What 10,000 Tweets Have Taught Me

Is your 10,000th tweet like hitting 100,000 miles on your car?

If you follow me on Twitter, you likely found this blog post when I linked to it on Twitter just now. That tweet was my 10,000th tweet since I opened my account on June 14, 2008.

I suppose it’s a social media milestone of sorts. Perhaps it’s a bit like when the odometer on your car turns over 100,000 miles.

I could blow right past it, but thought the occasion was an opportunity to think about what I’ve learned from my friends on Twitter and share that with you.

So here goes. What have I learned?

Twitter is a great tool to help you connect with people you would not have known otherwise. Smart people. Funny people. People from places you’ve never been to and may never live to see. Twitter has made the world smaller for me and I value that.

Twitter is one big focus group where you can quickly get a sense of public opinion shifting in real time. For a PR person like me, that’s invaluable. The same goes for reporters. (What would you do without a hashtag?)

Twitter is a fantastic way to connect with your customers, whether you run your own small business or work for a huge corporation like I do. (But it’s not necessarily the best way to manage customer service.)

Twitter helps you in an emergency. At Sprint, I first learned this when I used it to update customers after a 2008 earthquake in California disrupted the local landlines and eventually, wireless service. It’s now a standard way for us to update customers during a hurricane or other natural disaster. (Craig Fugate, the head of FEMA is on Twitter, too, and he personally runs his account. Follow him.)

Twitter is a tool of democratic activists around the world. Just look at the Arab Spring.

And for me, most importantly, Twitter is a thread which you can use to stitch together other content you create or find valuable on the Web. It’s really a two-way news service and the quickest way for me to sort through the fire hydrant of information I encounter on the Web each day.

What about you? What has have you learned from Twitter?