Five tips for twitter usage in the workplace
Here are some ideas for using twitter for work. We use this for Planypus since our team is highly distributed (both geographically and temporally). Sadly twitter doesn’t have true group support so what we’ve done is create private twitter accounts for our team and befriended each other. Those of us who have public twitter accounts use those separately.
1. Use twitter for lightweight status updates (instead of emailing team@) – example: i am upgrading our hosting account, or I am refactoring something
2. Use twitter to ask a question when you don’t know who should answer it – example: has anyone touched my code? has anyone talked to Bob about Task X?
3. Do not use twitter as a chatroom. Pretend it’s a reply-all email, if you wouldn’t do it there, take it offline and talk to the person directly.
4. Tweet once or twice a day to let the team know what you’re working on. It helps keep the ball rolling and identify roadblocks without relying on once-a-week meetings.
5. If going on vacation or extended leave, you can turn off twitter updates and use the rss feed to pull a once a day list of everything that happened. Using the guidelines above the tweets for the day should be a list of about 10 items so it’s easy to digest.
6. (ok I lied about only having five) Use a twitter client or twitter gtalk bot to keep updated. The website is ridiculously slow.
7. If you’re on the road and it’s easier to reply to a twitter than to private message someone, use the direct messaging feature “d [username] message” to keep things private but use twitter as a preferred routing mechanism.
How are you using twitter in your workplace?
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