Chris Brown leaves Twitter, how to make social media networking site Twitter useful

As beneficial as Twitter may be to strengthen working relationships (ex. get customer feedback) or to network about blogs, articles, new books, new music releases, etc., random thoughts can quickly make you lose followers and fans. And in today's job market, if the hiring manager sees your tweets and doesn't agree with what you're saying or forms opinions about your personality just from an innocent tweet, be prepared to not be hired.

So should you close your Twitter account and save yourself the drama? It depends on how you view the account and use the account. Some people choose to make their Twitter account private, which severely limits the amount of people who can find out about your work from a business end. Others choose to monitor those who follow them on Twitter, but that's useless because those who don't want you to know they're reading your tweets can just save you to their favorites and never alert you that they're reading your Twitter account's tweets on a regular basis.

And what if you just flat out don't care about the people who don't agree with your tweets and stand by the Freedom of Speech rule? That's your right, but you may also limit yourself in potential customers and starting new and continuing relationships, personal or professional.

So what's a happy medium? If you have a personal Twitter account, random tweets are expected so tweet what you like. But if your Twitter account is for personal and professional reasons or professional reasons, try to not add random tweets that don't help you find the followers you're looking for. If your focus is on supporting something like health care reform, you probably won't care about those who disagree with you on this political issue. Losing followers you don't want may be the last thing on your mind. It's losing followers that you want to keep around that makes or breaks what you tweet. And if you have too many random thoughts that have zero to do with health care reform or whatever your main focus is, they may lose interest in you and unfollow you no matter how many great tweets you send on topic. At least make 75 percent of your tweets on topic on a daily basis.

And how about those Twitter users that say it's rude to not follow someone who is following you? Although social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook make it mandatory to be in that person's life just as they're in yours, the beauty of Twitter is that you have that option. Follow those who you can build a personal or professional relationship with. As for the ones who feel like you're obligated to follow them, look at it from a logical perspective. If everyone on Twitter is adding random people who they don't care about to their Twitter following list just to increase their followers, chances are they're finding very few people that they're actually reading about. If they're following you to pay you no attention that makes about as much sense as coming into someone's home and complaining about how you'd rather not be there. You're free to leave at anytime. The door's that way.

But don't ignore the Twitter users who are actually helping you. If you see a Twitter user that is beneficial to your company or your background, follow him or her. Stay on subject as much as you possibly can. Make sure your bio clearly states why you're on Twitter. Avoid Twitter accounts that follow hundreds or thousands of people but don't have one tweet. And if you want to tweet random thoughts, make sure they're tweets that you'd be proud to defend if someone questioned you about them later.

Otherwise, you could land yourself into a bunch of Twitter trouble.