Twitter and What I Found There

Kevin Phillips "Tweet, Twitter, Internet, Social" December 2015 via pixabay. Public Domain Dedication

Although I have a Twitter, I only actively use it on occasion. I mostly just scroll through my feed when I'm bored or look at cute puppy videos or stuff about country music stars. That being said, after I scrolled through Twitter for a good hour looking at stuff completely unrelated to business, I got to work.

1. What kinds of things do people on Twitter seem to be talking about, debating, arguing about or otherwise engaging in meaningful exchanges of ideas about?

Simply searching the word "business" on Twitter did not help me in finding what I need. The search mostly provided me with tweets from random people use the word business in a casual sentence. So I got more specific.

I then tried searching "business news," and at first glance I thought that did the trick. After giving the search results a further look, however, I realized that my search mostly brought up three things: Nigerian daily news, news that isn't news (aka people tweeting "Want to expand your business news? Follow these people!), and a small variety of actual news stories mostly relating to google or small businesses.

The last search I tried was "American business," in an effort to find news stories from this country. This was a success. The search results provided tweets mostly relating to the "State of American Business Address," which, if I'm being honest, didn't even know existed.

2. In your opinion, what are the two most interesting conversations or stories you found in the Twitter feeds?

Two of the more interesting/factual accounts I came across were @TheEconomist and @businessinsider. Both of these accounts are verified on Twitter, which I thought was a good sign, so I started looking through them.

One thing I noticed as I was scrolling through both of these accounts feeds is that the business insider has less "news" based stories like politics, or war, or the economy and more stories about psychology and how much David Bowie left to his children.

The Economist, however, provided me with many news stories pertaining to other countries politics, American politics, and some other articles here and there.

3. Overall, what impression do you get of your discipline based on what you saw happening on Twitter? Were the people in these feeds talking in ways you expected or did not expect, about things you anticipated they'd be talking about or things you had no idea they'd be discussing?

Overall, I was pleased by this unknown territory of Twitter that I had yet to explore. There were many factual and beneficial articles posted to these Twitter feeds, many of which sparked my interest, and I followed a few accounts during the process as well.