The Top five Reasons of Why You Need to be on Twitter

Larger companies and older people are waking up to a world younger people have known for awhile.  It’s a world where you are a brand, like it or not.  It’s kinda like high school, with more inclusion and diversity, but it affects your life and your career more and more every day.

Your brand is a compilation of many things. You may be a mom, a wife, an author on how to use mobile media, a California resident, a 35 year old, a gardener, a movie fan, etc.  When you fly your flags on social media others connect to your interests and personality and then the magic begins to happen.

You, or your company, will be Googled by potential friends, partners and employers.  So, how are you managing your brand?  And by “manage,” I mean authentically communicating with your audience who is forming an opinion about you.

I am a self proclaimed evangelist for Twitter so it’s no surprise that my first recommendation to you is to get on Twitter, learn it’s value and be amazed at how it affects your life.

After only 4 months on Twitter I’ve made great business and personal contacts, connected to new tribes and been blown away by the power of crowd sourcing as I’ve built an online unofficial board of directors for my personal and professional lives.

I’ll write more posts later on how to be as effective as possible in utilizing Twitter in your personal and professional lives – which by now you’ve figured out blend together a lot more often then they used to.

So lets look at the Top Five reasons to be on Twitter as an individual.

Why should you become a person who tweets on Twitter?

1.  You are an influencer whether you know it or not.  There are things you know about and love to talk about that other people would love to learn about and vice versa.

2. Your life will be enhanced when you plug into tribes of people interested in your passions.  You’ll communicate regularly with people who are into your favorite past times.

You’ll turn each other on to cool books, movies, events and people that you’d otherwise have no clue about.  If you have a question about anything put it out on Twitter and you’ll get at least a few responses to help you out because people enjoy helping others.

3.  If you also blog and put yourself out as an influencer then you’ll get free stuff.

I’ll be seeing Cirque Du Soliel’s “O” for free next week because I tweeted @cirquelasvegas and offered to review the show on Twitter and in my blog.

Smart companies understand the value of communicating to customers through social media and having a regular Joe like me give them good press read by thousands of blog and Twitter followers.

Hey, look at that.  They’re already getting great press for being cool and knowing the benefit of being on Twitter and I haven’t even gone to the show yet.  …see how that works?

4.  You have access to powerful and cool people that you would never be able to contact outside of being on Twitter.  I’ve had public and private Twitter conversations with people like Guy Kawasaki (former Chief Evangelist for Apple, regular columnist for Entrepreneur magazine and founder of AllTop – which you have to check out now.)  Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Q Tip, MC Hammer and many other celebrities are on Twitter and may actually tweet you back.

4.5  You find powerful and non-powerful but fun people from around the world that become genuine acquaintance-friends or more.  And you’ll be amazed at how many of them you later meet in person.

I met a woman from Austrailia who was into books I like and in a Twitter conversation about her father who was in the hospital at the time we also discovered we have the same birthday.  There’s a lot of humanity in this technology.

During Hurricane Ike Twitter was buzzing with posts from people in Houston tweeting about what to do and where to go for shelter and help.  The earthquake in China before the Olympics was tweeted in real time on Twitter an hour before it hit CNN.

5.  Many of these online connections end up being people you meet at Tweet ups or other events and they become your offline friends too.

So pick up the free Twitter Handbook to get some more insight and start riding the Twitter wave today if you’re not already on.  If you’re already on Twitter, follow me (@sopan) and add comments to this post to help share the fun and value of it with others who read this.