TechLifeWeb

Are you an ‘insider’ in your industry? Go to all the smart cocktail parties? Get all the breaking news before it breaks? No? You should be.

What if I told you you could find out what smart leaders in your industry are reading about and thinking right now? What has their attention or what they have marked as important. Wouldn’t that be cool?

That, dear reader, is why I am on Twitter. Granted, as a technologist it is easier as the thought leaders are early adopters and using Twitter to its fullest. If you are in other industries then you may not have others that have truly grasped the power of Twitter. You have an opportunity, in those cases, to be the leader and help the others find the way.

You see, the more you are on Twitter the more you realize that it is all about the gestures. People find something interesting that they want others to see and they retweet it. Showing you, that is, gesturing to you, that they have paid attention to that topic and are assigning value to it.

An often overlooked Twitter feature are Favorites. The gestures here are very interesting. New favorites don’t show up in your normal twitter stream but if you go to the page of someone you follow you can look at them. People use these for all kinds of things. Sometimes they are kind of ego centric, marking their own tweets that have been retweeted. More often they are used as a kind of book mark. These are the really useful ones. These say ‘this tweet is important. I may want to return to this topic in the future.’  This really gives you a kind of insider peek into what is going on. Follow them long enough and you’ll start to really feel like an insider. Trends start to become clear. Sometimes these indicate ‘what’s next’ and other times they indicate what your fiend is into. The added benefit to following retweets and favorites is that you find new people as often these tweets are from people you don’t yet follow.

Next time I’ll show you the tools I have cobbled together to keep up to date with people who share great information.

Keep sharing.