I can only account for my experiences and one could argue that the resulting outcomes have been phenomenal and even atypical. That being said, Twitter has served as a an incredibly powerful tool in four specific areas:

• Networking: This is the most obvious. Through Twitter I’ve had the pleasure of building trusted and meaningful relationships with a wide variety of individuals, most of whom I never would have been privy to otherwise. This has allowed me to grow both personally and professionally.
• Business: My firm has secured multiple opportunities as a direct result of my Twitter presence. For example, I sent a tweet that clicked through to one of my blog posts. As a result of those 140 characters we were able to win a sole-source contract with one of the most powerful firms in the world. All of that happened in less than a week.
• Exposure: Twitter has allowed me to raise my profile in a significant way. My ideas and observations are distributed to a much broader audience than traditional marketing and the only cost is time. This is critically important if you are interested in stimulating dialogue and driving innovation.
• Philanthropy: As most of you know, JobAngels began with a single message on Twitter. To this day Twitter continues to serve as an emerging platform for helping those in need. This shows the power of the platform for social responsibility, ideation and impact.

My catalyst for writing this short post is the achievement of a milestone of sorts – my 5,000th follower. The means that over five thousand people are seeing what I tweet on a daily basis. It may not seem like much, but the reach of those followers is in the millions and that is why the network effect of Twitter is so powerful.

To show you how cool Twitter can be, let me describe my 5,000th follower in more detail. His name is Adam Lewis and he is COO of a young firm out of London by the name of Innovate CV. Their solution involves the creation and distribution of multi-media resumes/CVs to help job seekers stand out from the crowd. It can incorporate audio and video, include samples of your work, certificates and the like. It also integrates directly with recruiting firms and agencies to allow for a seamless candidate management experience. Pretty slick stuff. As for Adam himself, he’s a very bright guy whose prior work experience covers the who’s-who of the European financial markets, including HSBC, ABN AMRO, Barclays Capital and a consulting stint with Accenture.

I would never have met Adam if not for Twitter and I think that’s pretty cool.

So what about you? How has Twitter changed your life? Who are some of the fascinating and interesting people you’ve met along the way? Share your thoughts below, be sure to follow me on Twitter and let’s keep the online and offline conversation going.