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Twitter is my office

Twitter is starting to feel like an office place for me. There are so many advantages in using twitter as a freelance web designer / developer. Including the instant collaboration that can occur between groups of designers, the local lunchtime and after hours events with "co-workers", as well as the standard business building. All three of these things occur daily in office buildings across the world, but can be few and far between for the lonely freelancer.

I spend most of my days by myself. I don't have a boss watching my every move, and I don't have employees asking how high they can jump for me. This isn't such a bad thing though, as it means company meetings always end when I want them too. However, this can be a major disadvantage when it comes to creative collaboration. I don’t think I realized how powerful my followers could be until I announced the relaunch of my site. Not only did I get the standard praise, I also received numerous DM’s about ways to make my site better (including lots of my spelling and grammar mistakes).

In spending most of my days by myself you can imaging what lunch times are like. Lunch is typically a solitary event that often occurs right here at my desk. That is, if I even have lunch. Since twitter, I spend a few lunches a week out with people that I have met or simply communicated with. From official tweet-lunches, to the business meetings that happen over lunch, or just coffee for that matter. Then there are the happy hour tweet ups that are becoming a regular occurrence around here.

I could probably spend an entire post on business building on twitter, but I’ll keep this short. I’ve been lucky enough to use twitter to get meetings with some of the top design agencies here in town. The results have been incredible with most of my new business is coming from people I met directly on twitter. There are even talks occurring with companies outside my local area, so it’s safe to say that my twitter business building will go nationwide in the next 6-9 months.

Twitter supplies a lot of the white noise that can occur in an office setting as well. My water cooler has 450 people around it, but unlike an office setting... I can turn the conversations off when I need to. Twitter has more uses than I can count, but I know how I use it. I use twitter like an office.

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