The poopy sounding app sits in your Mac’s menu bar until you’re ready to “drop a tweet” or view your account without scanning the six hundred tabs you have open for Twitter.

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Try quitting Twitter cold turkey for a few days and see what happnes. No reading tweets, no tweeting, no clever hashtagging allowed.

Why would you consider such a thing? Because if you’re a Twitter addict (and we bet you are), you’ll likely feel withdrawal symptoms – and it’s better to be aware of your addiction now and do something about it than suffer needlessly later (if you’re ever separated from the microblogging platform against your will).

And it’s just kind of fun to freak you out.

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New Year’s is the best time of year to check in with yourself for a little annual health appraisal.

Eyesight any worse? Exercising frequently? Avoiding those carbs?

Addicted to Twitter?

Weaning yourself off from Twitter, if your obsession with it is becoming unhealthy, is no small feat. But we’re here to help stage an intervention.

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Twitter is like a drug, in many ways: it gives your brain a short-term thrill that you look for over, and over again. It alters your behavior as you seek the pleasure hits a retweet gives you. And it sometimes negatively impacts other areas of your life.

Without help, you might become a total Twitter addict – believe me, I’ve seen it happen.
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This infographic takes you through the four stages of getting Twitter, from a complete inability to understand its purpose to a total Twitter addiction. What stage have you reached?
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A recent study has shown that Twitter, Facebook and other online communication outposts (such as email) can be more addictive than cigarettes, alcohol and even sex.

So how do you know if you’ve got a problem?

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The study unveils the top 10 countries where Twitter has the greatest reach amongst the online population, and reveals a surprising winner.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Sure, modern technologies easily let us connect with social platforms whilst we’re moving around, but this is a convenience rather than a necessity. You don’t have to provide 24/7 updates for every… little… thing. Or, crucially, every big thing. It’s easy to get caught up in all of this malarkey, often at the expense of the stuff that really matters.

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Twitter isn’t for everybody, but it is for almost everybody. Certainly anyone who has something to say, lives any kind of life that isn’t completely and utterly devoid of events or wants to follow the lives, thoughts and events of others. And despite what a lot of folks think, very few individuals fit that description.

(Although given the amount of tweets about food intake – and outtake – this might not appear to be the case.)

So, Twitter can and will work for the majority. The trick is to make a habit of it. Here’s how you do it:

How To Make A Habit Of Twitter

1. Swot up – it’s worth spending some time reading about what Twitter is and how it works. My Twitter 101 tutorials are a great place to begin.
2. Be yourself.
3. Learn the math.
4. Use the right tools – Twitter.com is much better than it used to be but you need to be able to monitor your streams easily and effectively, and software like HootSuite is better. The same goes for mobile usage – do some research on what is accepted as the best mobile client for your brand of phone and install it. For example, Twitter For iPhone, Twitter For iPad, UberSocial (Blackberry), Twidroyd (Android), etc. Try others, but the market leader is usually the leader for a reason, and typically the best place for the new user to start.
5. Twitter isn’t Facebook. The platform, experience and audience are completely different – and will expect different things from you.
6. Check at least the latest tweets on your homepage 2-3 times a day, spaced apart, seven days a week. If you have more time to spare, then great, but you don’t have to become obsessed for Twitter to have value. 30 minutes a day is more than enough. It shouldn’t feel like work, and it also shouldn’t be something you want to get away from. Checking Twitter on your phone when you’re queuing at the Post Office should feel second nature and normal – not something you have to do.
7. Pay very close attention to your mentions folder – always reply promptly and courteously. While your network size is small, use push notifications on your phone if they’re supported by your software as these work as a great prompt.
8. Follow people that YOU find interesting – if Twitter seems ‘boring’, you’ve only got yourself to blame.
9. If nobody is following you, there’s probably a good reason.
10. Don’t protect your profile – it will only limit the experience.
11. Figure out where you fit in the Twitter social space – for example, your timezone and the timezone of your audience might not be the same.
12. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to actually tweet at all to still get a ton of value from Twitter.

Follow these guidelines, and pretty soon you should start to get a solid feel for how Twitter works. It’s generally accepted that you need to invest 30 days in something to make a habit of it, so give Twitter a good month before making up your mind. I suspect that things will click a lot earlier, but if you’re reading and engaging each and every day for four weeks (and a bit), you’ll definitely be in a great position to decide whether Twitter is for you.

And unless you’re one of those very few, I can almost guarantee that it will be.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.