Twitter is a tool to broadcast messages to people you know and people you don’t know. At the heart of it is the central problem of what to tweet. What should you write and what should you say? What do you want to transmit or share that represents who you are? What do you want people to care or know about?

I think one of the main problems is the question you’re asking. The default question you’ll see on Twitter is ‘What are you doing now’. The question determines the answer, so one way to tweak Twitter into something that works for you is to change the question. Instead of ‘what are you doing?’, ask something else. Maybe the following:

Dave Poulson talked about the use of Twitter during an internet broadcast of US Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s annual state of the state speech. The Twitter discussion online was accompanied by a hashtag established by the governor’s staff, thereby allowing other users to use the hashtag to discuss specific points. He offers some suggestions on how journalists and media can regulate Twitter discussions:

Perhaps the journalist’s role in this kind of activity is to simply help establish and publicize the hashtag. In this case, that wasn’t necessary because of the governor’s Twitter-savvy staff. But that won’t always be the case. And journalists (like any other Twitter user) can still play a role in publicizing the relevant hashtags in play.

We know all the value of Twitter when seeking recommendations for specific products or feedback. It’s invaluable to get comments from people of all walks of life, especially when its all arriving in real time. It’s very useful when you’re unfamiliar with what you’re talking about and need more personal info from people you trust. The cool thing is that your Twitter posse is a virtual collection of friends that are accessible anytime, anyplace.. as long as you have an internet/mobile connection.

Picture by Tony Gigov

As you probably know, Twitter has a limit of 140 characters for each ‘tweet’ and this forced brevity not only reduces the amount of time to make a tweet but encourages users to tweet often in regular intervals. Sometimes you might encounter the problem of having too much to say: at this time, the character limit stops from you expressing yourself fully. Learning to work within Twitter’s character limit is one of the ways to help you enjoy the service, while making sure that your points are carried across.

There are 3 ways of doing so: