Mixing Twitter and Work


Twitter. It’s a great escape.

It’s overflowing with helpful resources and links. It gives you an inside look at the latest trends and enables you to connect with authors, celebrities and industry professionals you once could only admire from afar. What’s not to love?

The allure of Twitter is getting harder and harder to overlook, but many workers are still hesitant to fully participate. Social media is often viewed as a distraction in the workplace. Making your tweets public is like giving your boss a minute-by-minute record of your distraction level. Do you really want to chance using Twitter at work?

Besides the whole not-working-at-work stigma, Twitter can potentially lead to other problems as well. Although you may try hard to keep your tweets professional and clean, you never know how someone else might interpret them. What you think is smart and funny may be a total turn-off to someone else. Self-employed workers must be careful to avoid offending potential clients as well. There’s a certain level of risk to be sure. You have to find a way to be smart about it.

So how do you handle Twitter in the workplace? Do you tweet at work? Do you choose to keep your profile private? Or do you think these concerns are not really that big a deal?


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Sarah Nagel is lucky to live in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. She works as an editor by day and a freelance writer by night. Connect on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/sarahnagel.

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