Introduction
Twitter is an indispensable tool that keeps you up to date with the latest trends and news in your domain of work. I’ll be using my blog to share a few tips and tricks I have learnt over the years.
Tweets are a steady flow of unscheduled packets of information on your timeline and it is not always possible to read every single one of them. Unlike an email inbox, it is best to discard unread tweets if you are unable to view tweets for a couple of days.
There are always some Twitter accounts you’d like to track
There are a few accounts whose tweets you may not want to miss even when you don’t have time to monitor your twitter account.
For example, I like to follow tweets from –
- The company’s twitter account (or sub account) to stay tuned with the business and RT if something catches my eye.
- All team members who I work closely with.
- All accounts that use twitter to alert their customers about delays / failures in their service or have breaking announcements. These are super critical alerts I care about such as delays on my commute routes, security alerts for software I care about, etc.
- Tweets from close friends and family with whom I like to interact with.
Mobile Notifications
This is where Twitter’s mobile notification feature comes handy.
- Turn on notifications and get alerts on your mobile phone whenever the account you care about tweets. Twitter will send regular mobile alerts on your smart phone and these alerts are *not* sent as SMS messages.
- You will be notified on your phone / tablet and you can immediately read the tweet and react to it.
- The notifications are sent even if you were not mentioned in the tweet.
- In order to use this feature, you should be following the person for whom you’d like to set an alert.
The image below shows how to turn on mobile notifications for accounts you follow. Click it to view in a new window.
I have been using this feature ever since it was launched. It helps prioritize tweets you want to read without the fear of following too many people or being away from your twitter account.
So if you are looking for some sanity within the chaos called Twitter, this is a must have feature that you should try out.