If you're a manager tired of employees going on Twitter to inadvertently divulge proprietary secrets and ruin the company's branding efforts, then you're not going to like a new report from security company Palo Alto Networks that says workplace Twitter use jumped 700% last year.
Facebook is still number one with employees, but Twitter's Strunk & White-inspired verbal delivery system is taking its measly 140 characters to the top and it's never looking back. Or is it? Hmm. Will we still be tweeting in five years or will Twitter be replaced by the latest, greatest creation by two dudes at a university somewhere (TM) that is sure to cost companies millions in lost employee productivity and revenue? I'm betting on the latter.
Managers will also love that employees are more likely to be actively writing tweets instead of simply reading them. Awesome. Everyone is talking but not listening, because we're too caught up in our own thoughts and random spelling errors. We're living in a social media vacuum where what we say is the most important thing ever said. Sorry, did you say something?
But maybe this is the way society is trending, because who has the time to "follow" 67,234 people on any given day? No one, that's who. You'll lose ten followers this hour but gain twelve new followers by noon. But who's counting? Twitter is like a roller coaster stock market for people with commitment issues.
Sigh. You know what I've never liked about social media? The subtle and unrelenting peer pressure to be involved in it, thanks largely to the media. You need to be doing this, because it's what everyone should be doing. For the average employee or job seeker, this means feeling pressured to create the perfect social media profile to land or keep a job while knowing that employers simultaneously reserve the right to turn away applicants or fire employees for what they do on social media. It's a strange Catch-22 that smart applicants and employees are right to be worried about, and one the workplace will be coming to grips with for years to come.
My advice? Just be who you are, and with any luck you know who that is by now. Trying to become someone you're not never works out very well. If you want to be on every social media site, then by all means go for it. If you don't, then don't. And if you don't, never let the media or anyone else make you feel like a loser for keeping a lower profile because you're actually very smart to maintain some online boundaries in this day and age. Besides, there's a social life outside of social media that can be quite fun.
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