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How long have you been using Twitter/social media?

We have used Facebook for publishing photos and updates from our charity ‘BuildAid’ for a few years now, and we have been tweeting from since October 2010, so just over a year in total.

What made you take the plunge?

Advice and recommendations from current high profile users seemed sound and it was considered important to keep up with modern advances in technology and information services in the same way that we are looking at implementing BIM into some of the design work we do. What twitter does do is allows a user to follow a highly specific group of people who are limited in what they say, so creates a more focussed search and return information facility than the ‘scattergun’ nature of most web advertising and blogging, and when filtered correctly can provide a near instant information release facility, saving valuable time and ensuring the correct recipients are being used to either answer queries or for research.

In what ways do you use social media?

We tweet, staff and organisations have ‘LinkedIn’ profiles, and we also have regular updates from our charity ‘BuildAid’ on Facebook and twitter.

What successes have you had?

The variation of requirements in surveying gives a wide scope for using twitter in terms of business or service marketing, information publishing or research, or user or product recommendations to others.

Instant answers to questions such as ‘who can recommend a suitable structural engineer for beam calculations and design proving in the buckhurst hill area’ are valuable and usuallycome with recommendations from trusted professionals in a fraction of the time that an internet search would take, and would still result in an unknown results in terms of performance.

What challenges have you faced?

Twitter has an extremely steep learning curve and mainly due to its deep and rich data content as with most online content, needs to be subject to considerable filtering activity to maximise its value (while following many people is a good way to ensure that you are well followed and heard, filtering this many people’s tweets can be an onerous task, one made much easier by the creation of lists and being ruthlessly