Dan Curtis ~ Professional Personal Historian

Thanks to Diane Haddad at Genealogy Insider for giving me the idea for this article.

These days there’s a lot in the news about Twitter. Some of you might be tempted to dismiss it as a fad and of little value to you as a personal historian. Well I’ve been using Twitter for several months now and I see it’s potential for some real opportunities.  Here are eight reasons why I think you should give it a try:

1. Expand your network. Open up to a whole new group of personal and family historians. Go to the search box on Twitter and enter “family stories” or “life stories”. All kinds of folks will pop up who have some connection to these topics. When you’ve found some people to follow, check out who they’re following. You might want to follow some of these people as well.
2. Drive traffic to your blog or website. The Google search engines like activity. The more they see the more your site will rank higher on Google pages. You can feed your blog posts to your Twitter account and attract a whole new group of readers. I’ve noticed a definite increase in visitors to my blog since I started using Twitter.
3. Get great ideas. Many bloggers (including yours truly) find a wealth of ideas for material to write about in their blog. In addition, there are creative ways that people are preserving family stories – ways that you might never have considered.
4. Ask questions. Twitter is a good way to get some feedback. You can ask a question of all your followers or direct it to one person using @ and their user name  like this: @dancurtis.
5. Find how-to advice. There are lots of great tips and links to useful online articles.
6. Be on top of the latest personal history news. Twitter is a huge interconnected web with millions of users picking up news and often “Retweeting” it before a story hits the newsstand or airwaves.
7. Find bargains. Whether it’s travel, supplies or equipment there are great deals and giveaways often exclusive to Twitter users. You can  go to Twitter search and type in #bargains where you’ll find a goldmine that would warm the heart of any “shopaholic”.
8. Your own “virtual”water cooler. If you work from home, it can sometimes be lonely. With Twitter you can jump in at any time of the day and follow the conversations or join in yourself. It can break the sense of isolation that can too easily be part of self-employment.

Okay, so have I convinced you to give it a try? If you’re already using Twitter, are there other benefits I forgot to mention? Drop me a comment and let me know.

You can follow me on Twitter by clicking here.

Flickr upload by Rane

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