I can’t emphasize this enough - if you are a professional, if you need to market anything, if you know anyone who is on Twitter, if you have a business or work for a company, if you use the Internet, GO AND SIGN UP FOR TWITTER TODAY. Here’s the link: https://twitter.com/signup

Just do it. Stop hesitating. Sign up now.

Twitter takes awhile to understand. So you need to get started today. If you use Facebook, it won’t take you too long to catch on - it’s just like the “Status updates” that you’re used to writing and reading from your friends every day. (By the way, if you’re not on Facebook, SIGN UP NOW!)

More and more companies are using Twitter. Dell just announced that it made $1 million dollars using Twitter. Politicians are using the site. So are celebrities and musicians and sports stars. They are talking about it on Fox Business and my brother and husband both have accounts. Santa can be tracked using Twitter. Twitter is moving from the early-adopter crowd to mass adoption and the earlier you start to use the service and understand it, the better off you’ll be.

When I started using Twitter in October 2007, I wasn’t sure that it would catch on. But adoption is skyrocketing (see the graph below from Compete.com). Even if you don’t like Twitter or use it all the time, it will help you in your work if you understand what the service is and how to use it. The only way to truly understand Twitter is to get an account.

Just compare Twitter’s growth (above) to Facebook’s (below). Facebook has more total unique visitors, but the growth its growth slope is slower. And considering that many people who use Twitter never visit Twitter.com (instead using clients such as TweetDeck to follow the conversation), it’s likely that the chart UNDER-emphasizes Twitter’s growth.

You must be part of the conversation, and to do that, you have to be on Twitter. So join today.

Follow me on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/mchang16

UPDATE: I just saw Robert Scoble’s “thought for the morning” and realize that he’s totally right. Twitter is big, but Facebook is getting massive.

I joined Twitter for the first time in October 2007. My journey using the tool hasn’t always been smooth, as I’ve documented here, here and here. But over time, Twitter has become increasingly useful to me in my business and personal life. Last week, I started using TweetDeck, thanks to a recommendation from @jmeserve, and it has changed my Twitter life.

TweetDeck provides a clean and easy-to-use interface that allows me to read the stream of posts from my followers, as well as to monitor my @replies and direct messages all in one pane. More importantly, TweetDeck also allows me to create sub-groups of followers that I want to monitor differently (or more closely). This was a problem that I originally tried to solve by creating a second Twitter account, but I like TweetDeck’s solution so much better. Perhaps the coolest feature of TweetDeck is the TwitScoop interface, which shows me “what’s buzzing right now” using a tag cloud that highlights the topics that are getting the most buzz on Twitter at any given moment. Today I found out about the Chicago Tribune filing for bankruptcy, the fighter jet crash in San Diego, and the new Blackbird browser all from using this feature.

The best thing about TweetDeck, however, is how quickly it has made me more effective at using Twitter. Just today, I spotted a post from @garyvee in real-time, responded quickly, and got a fantastic plug back that resulted in 100 new followers in about 10 minutes. (See the string of messages, along with a screenshot of the interface below.)

Moral of the story? TweetDeck is a powerful business tool, and I highly recommend it. If you’re not using Twitter yet, get started today here and follow me at @mchang16.

And here’s the screen of TweetDeck - it’s a bit hard to see because the screenshot shrunk when it was posted, but the first column is the full feed of all the people I follow, the second column is my “must reads,” the third column is the TwitScoop and off to the right is my @replies.