How Twitter Makes You A Better IT Manager
By now you’ve most likely joined Twitter (and if you haven’t, you need to, right now!). Twitter is not only a great place to talk about ITIL®, Cloud Computing, Help Desk and IT Management, but it’s also a great place to sort out your writing skills.
Yes. You read that right.
Twitter can make you a better writer and as a result make you a better IT Manager. Here’s how.
Twitter forces you to expand your vocabulary
Since you only have 140 characters to get your message across, you’re forced to find new words to use—Words that are shorter, words that are more explanatory, and words that say what you want to say in 140 characters or less.
Writing tweets means you have to “expand” your verbs (replacing adverbs and adjectives with them), and discover a better, clearer and more concise way to say what you want to say.
You need to re-write your initial thought to make it fit into 140 characters. Rewriting means improving.
Twitter forces you to improve your editing skills
Every writer needs to be able to edit their work. And by using Twitter, you can really hone your editing skills and make them top-notch.
It’s almost like playing a game; trying to write a 140-character message and still get your point across in a way that inspires your followers to take action, to click on your link or to “retweet” your post. Ideally your message is LESS than 140 characters so you leave space for your retweeters to add a personal note.
Twitter forces you to be to the point
If you’ve ever used Twitter, you know that you have 140 characters to say whatever you want to say. this is not 140 words—or even 140 letters—I said 140 characters. Letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation and spaces all count as characters on Twitter.
This teaches you to be concise – a fantastic skill for any IT Manager to have. No more 400 page reports, but concise and to the point executive summaries that tell the reader exactly what you had in mind.
Many writers, however, are “wordy” and often have long, drawn out descriptions and sentences, so it can be pretty difficult to create a message that’s only 140 characters.
Here’s where Twitter comes in again.
Being a better writer means being clear in your communication. Great IT Managers are fantastic communicators. So using twitter makes you a better IT Manager.
Yet another reason you should be using Twitter. Not that you needed one.