Twitter? Or Twit?

Many people write off Twitter as useless, superfluous and just plain ridiculous. 

We agree in 2 cases:

• if you don't need to share with friends and the wider world your 'status'

• if you, your friends and or your industry aren't on it

But while many use Twitter as a psuedo-public diary of their lives, it can be used to great effect for non-social purposes.   Twitter can:

• give users an easy way to monitor 'Twitter-hip' companies, industries and industry leaders

• enable real time, quick-news postings about how to best use products, even what regulatory issues a given industry or company is facing

As a result, following just a handful of industry leaders will yield insights and great competitive information.

So, how do we at Bandwidth Twitter?  We follow the high tech industry with one account, the Design world with another, and the Marketing world with a third. 

We also choose to follow keywords of interest, and pay close attention to industry leaders and innovative companies, what they're saying, who they're following. 

Seesmic and Tweet Deck provide free software which allows a Twitter user to follow multiple accounts and subjects at once with minimal clutter.

Like most things, you get out what you put into the system.  And as always online, its caveat emptor, or Twitter-read beware:  if you blindly trust what jabbermouth26 says, you might get burnt.