How to Use Twitter to Manage Your Life

Twitter is one of the various social networking websites that cropped up on the Internet in the last few years. Twitter was launched in 2006 and the microblogging platform that lets you post 140 characters messages (commonly called tweets) has become more popular in the last year or so. To some, Twitter is an important marketing tool, be it for announcing a new blog post or a new product launch, but Twitter also has some everyday uses that the average person can find pretty useful.

Personal diary: it is a sad realisation that the widespread use of emailing and the Internet may have been a factor in less and less people putting pen to paper but one of the perks is that people who may not have otherwise kept a journal or diary have started to use blogging. Twitter is a platform that allows people to keep track of what their achievements and feelings at a certain time, but for those who don't feel like writing a novel just because their baby took their first step, tweeting the news is as easy as a 140 characters long message.

Weight loss tool: Twitter can be used as a food diary. A lot of people who keep a food diary in order to keep an eye on their diet keep a note of the foods they have been eating during the day but it is easy to fall into the trap of only writing what they ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner and forget about snacks; even if you don't bring your laptop everywhere with you or don't own an iphone, setting up your mobile to quickly send updates to your Twitter account is very easy so there are no more excuses for dieters to forget that afternoon latte anymore.

Free ads: if you have something to sell, give away or if you are looking for an item that can't be found in your local shops, no need to pay for an advertisement in your local newspaper, just say so in one of your updates (you can also retweet it if you felt your message has been buried by too many other messages) and let interested parties send you a direct message. Be careful though, do not share personal details with strangers online and arrange to meet in a public place unless you already know the person who replies to your message. In order to reach your target audience, make use of the hash symbol (#) followed by the item in question as well as your locality. This will ensure that your tweet doesn't get lost in a sea of other messages as updates can be easily buried by other users' tweets.

Free newspaper: if you want to know what is happening in the World or just locally but can't be bothered to watch a full news programme, find out if your local TV news channel or newspaper is on Twitter and if they are, follow them; this way everytime they post a tweet you will know what is going on and if you want to read more about the topic just follow their link if they have added one in their message. You will save money because there's no need to buy the paper every day and also time as you don't have to flick through pages of news that you don't care about or sit through an entire news programme in order to see the bit that interests you.

Twitter can be a very useful tool in the management of everyday life, especially for people who need to monitor some aspects of their lives or simply to keep up with the outside World. I am all for using Twitter but there is such a thing as Twitter abuse: people who use Twitter to post every single thing they do every day like what time they got up, how often they visited the toilet and whether they washed their socks or not should probably close their Twitter account and get a life.