If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively describing events define you, as they would define a machine.
–Jared Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
Many people have the false impression that Twitter is an empty micro-blogging service that people use to say what they are doing at the moment. While you may, indeed, be “having a sandwich,” it’s not a particularly interesting Tweet. It’s not even saying anything meaningful about yourself. Some people do use Twitter this way, but the more interesting and useful approaches include such activities as:
- sharing links to interesting articles and web content
- networking
- sharing photos, videos, other content
- airing an opinion, joke or observation to start a conversation
- “crowdsourcing” answers to questions
- cataloging useful tools and links (for your followers and for your own use later)
- breaking news & other journalistic approaches.
Twitter allows you to set up multiple accounts, so you can be quite specific about what you Tweet. In other words, you can aim for a niche and align one account with that topic. That said, you may also want to have a more general account, because Twitter, like many web technologies, can be quite addictive. You may find yourself spending a lot of time maintaining multiple accounts. Tweetdeck makes it somewhat easier to use multiple accounts.
Ultimately, it’s up to you. Tweet what you want to tweet. You have 140 characters, but remember that if you want people to “retweet” you — to forward your tweet to their followers, to leave some characters for that (14-20 should do). And if you’re adding a link, make sure you use some kind of link shortening service such as bit.ly to shorten the URL so that it takes up fewer characters.