In Week 5 of the SMS module, the focus is on Twitter as a popular social media platform.
For those not in the know yet, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that is setup in a time-line format with messages (Tweets) of 140 characters or less. The tweets may include handle names of other Twitter users and/or hash tags that refer to a specific subject of the tweet.
An interesting aspect of Twitter is the variety of content that is available. Once you start following Twitter handles (user accounts), Twitter will recommend other handles of similar interest to the ones you are following. This in turn, will lead you to possibly follow others of similar interest.
Now what does this all have to do with finding your life passion and career path?
Well, a lot in fact. For those who are not focused on any specific career path or sort of undecided and have made attempts to answer the question "What should I do with my life?", Twitter may just be the tool to help you find that answer.
Unlike Facebook, where users tend to mostly connect with friends and school mates, Twitter is more about connecting with influencers, celebrities and companies. It can also be used to follow other authoritative sources of information. While the spectrum of what and who to follow on Twitter is massively huge, one can commence on Twitter by simply following a couple of their friends who are on Twitter. The fact that they are friends of this person, means there is some alignment of interests to begin with. These friends will have a list of others they follow and one can see their list of followers and followings very easily. Also Twitter will recommend others to follow based on the initial follow list.
If one spends enough productive time (say a total of an hour on Twitter through the whole day) and peruses little snippets of information and starts to build up a decent "Following" list over time, it is likely that the things being followed are of great interest to that person. In addition, by also tweeting out to the twitterverse, and developing a "Follow" list will indicate if the messages have enough intensity behind them to generate interest for others to hear more from you.
By doing both, in time, if one goes in to the lists to see the overall theme of what it is they follow and what they most write about, one will be able to see patterns forming that may suggest an area of particular interest to that person.
For instance when I started out on Twitter, my lists grew organically as I followed and was followed randomly. But over time, I realised that a disproportionate number of areas that I was following and also was being followed from were travel bloggers. Soon I realised that travel writing was something I was very inclined to pursue and also something where I had an authoritative voice. I also learnt that I loved to get tips on ways to save money and gave out advice on how to save money on Twitter. This led be to develop a blog focused on saving money and travelling more, which soon became a semi-professional gig for me.
So if you are one who has not yet found your calling, I encourage you to spend time on Twitter and just let yourself loose there without thinking too much about why and who you are following. After some time (say a couple of months) evaluate your lists and see if you can tell any patterns from it. It is likely that it is telling you what you like to enjoy doing the most. And if you think you have something very interesting to say about that subject area, then you may just be on your way to identifying your ideal career path.
-Abi
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