Tweet This: I’m now a believer and a twitterer, here’s why

I opened my first twitter account on September 4th, 2008. I figured, I’m a technology blogger, I test-drive lots of products, services and website, so why not this-since the buzz was getting hot and heavy. After I set it for my blog siliconcaribe.com, twitter.com/siliconcaribe, I twittered exactly twice there after and abandoned it. I just didn’t get it.
Yet, I was on Facebook, driving my 400 friends nuts with Facebook updates on the road from my Blackberry, at home chilling, when I’m up late working on client projects-whenever and where ever. I use those Facebook updates to do pretty much any and everything. I am using it to share how I’m feeling, what I’m doing, where I’m going, to sharing video links, article links, pointing people to my two blogs, this one and caribbeanstartupblog.com and many times the Facebook update would start a mini debate on a subject, with my friends in turn sharing opinions and other links to videos, articles and websites. Outside of regularly updating my Facebook status I am also a rabid text message sender, in fact most times I prefer to text than talk, my year old Blackberry is overworked and oh yeah my fingers too.
All this was setting the stage to my eureka moment however late, that Twitter.com is in essence a 140-character update like you do on Facebook and 20 characters less than you are allowed to send as a regular text message. It taps into our time-crunched lives, and also our innate human desire to remain connected with our friends and colleagues and to be in the loop of what’s happening in our immediate or wider world.
With all that in the back of my head, I didn’t become a full convert until the Social Media Marketing Workshop last week in Kingston,Jamaica, where I shared presentation duties with Dana Todd, Chief Marketing Officer of Newsforcenetwork.com and Fionn Downhill, CEO of Elixir Interactive– both Search/Internet marketing experts and seasoned conference speakers. They did a Twitter 101 and how to use Twitter for Business run through for the workshop attendees and pretty much showed us all a little bit of the burgeoning ecosystem that now includes
– search.twitter.com – a search engine function where you can find our what people are saying about you, your company, your competitors, brand, country, event
– Twitterberry – for those of us who like to update our tweets as much as we do our Facebook updates.

The day after I restarted twittering. I’m a regular twitterer, I created one for my personal branding purposes, so you can follow me on twitter.com/ingridriley and I started one two for this blog at twitter.com/siliconcaribe. I am also an avid follower…I’m following Top5jamaica.com, the top Jamaican site directory, my new best friends Dana Todd and Fion Downhill, and also venture capitalist, entrepreneur and influential blogger Guy Kawasaki who doles out excellent tweet links to great articles and events. Now I’m busy searching for Jamaica and Caribbean life on there. Give it a try.

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