Do you remember the first time you heard about Twitter? I do. In the beginning, it was a way to interact with celebrities. Now, it has become so much more.

Social media, or SoMe for short, is a great way to connect with people that are in your profession. There are many types of social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Yammer, Instagram, Vine, and the list goes on. I want to focus primarily on Twitter. This platform can be a great way to develop yourself through connecting with people and events.

Attend a Conference Through Twitter

Conferences are a great way to keep up with the trends that occur in L&D. They not only keep you current with valuable sessions, but also connect you with people in your profession you may never have met otherwise. Unfortunately, we can’t always get to conferences. So how do we get the development we need from a conference without actually being there? Twitter, of course!

If you’ve ever “followed”—that is how you connect with people on Twitter, by “following” them—colleagues that attended a conference you weren’t able to, you have experienced how powerful a tool Twitter can be. Most conferences have a hashtag like #ASTD2014 that when searched will show all the posts related to that hashtag. It’s beneficial to know the hashtag for any conference, because whether you are attending or not, you can see the sessions as people tweet about them, and participate in the conference secondhand.

Another great feature of Twitter are great conversations you can have with your colleagues who are at the conference even if you can’t be there. People that are attending the conference will often post pictures of slides with a tweet that gives the image more meaning. You can reply to a conference goer’s tweet and actually engage in the conversations going on in the conference. That way you can understand the point of a conference goer’s post and glean tiny bits of learning. If you like what you see, retweet or favorite the tweet; then you can always look back at it later by viewing your tweets.

Learning by Chatting

One thing about Twitter is that the conversations you can have are endless. Even if a conference is not going on, learning something new through Twitter is easy.

Every week there are tweet chats dedicated to the learning profession. There are so many types of engaging topics that explore great trends in L&D. There are two chats that take place on Thursdays, #chat2lrn and #lrnchat. Both are great for engaging with professionals and informal social peer-to-peer learning. I usually participate in #lrnchat, which takes place from 8:30–9:30 p.m. ET. The topics vary from analogies used in learning to anxiety in the workplace. The moderator tweets a question and you can tweet to answer the question, or reply to someone else’s tweet regarding the question. It’s a place where learning professionals meet every week to talk about learning and sometimes other things like a ukulele).

Twitter can be a powerful tool in the learning community. I hope you will find it useful in developing your social media skills and in your development as a professional. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming #lrnchat session! Stay tuned for the next post on how to keep up with L&D!

Come join the conversation!

Contribute and get involved with Young Professionals!