Today I got to give a mini-tutorial on Twitter at my workplace, and talk about the benefits of it for a business. It’s exciting to have it branching out in different ways; this started as a simple question of publicity for an upcoming event.

Twitter really is a necessity for any business or business-person; there are a growing number of businesses advertising positions on Twitter, sometimes exclusively. And with news sites, retweets, and the ability to sort into timelines, it is a growing Internet hub.

It’s quite a paradigm shift, reading about social media in articles like this one. I’ve been on networking sites of various kinds since early in high school; at that point, we were the young end of the target audience, and it was a good way to find and make friends with and procrastinate on homework by talking to people all around the world with similar interests. Now, as I’m becoming a young professional, and looking for ways to reach my target audience, I’m encountering all of this information and excitement about the uses of social media for professional networking. And I realized; I can do this. I had to be kicked off Facebook late at night in high school, and I had a Twitter to follow some of my favorite comic artists. But the approach was new, the view of it as a real professional tool and not just a way to keep in touch with friends half way around the globe. It really is an exciting thing, altering my views and approaches to keep up with this wave.