Happy Twitter anniversary to me. I joined Twitter exactly one year ago today. It took a little convincing, but once I figured out how to incorporate it into my freelance business I never looked back.

Earlier today, I tweeted the following lessons learned from my first year on the microblogging service, 17 in honor of joining on Dec. 17, 2008. Every one of them is 140 characters or less.

What I’ve learned:

1 – Be real. People can see through a fake, even online. Therefore, don’t use auto–DMs.

2 – One note may work for a samba, but not online. Don’t tweet on same topic 24/7, even if you’re here for work.

3 – Don’t drink and tweet. But if you do, the next day, delete the tweets. (I got that tip from a Twitterati.)

4 – You don’t have to DM every new follower, esp. once you hit 2,000+. But do DM those you want to know better.

5 – Lists are great organizational tools, but if you follow a lot of people, building them’s a bear.

6 – While good in theory, #FF is hard to keep up, especially if like me, all deadlines seem to fall on Fridays.

7 – Twitter is just a tool. It will not find you customers or make you rich. You do that. All it does is help.

8 – As a writer, Twitter forces me to be concise and use colorful words and phrases. It’s my robo-copydesk.

9 – Twitter is not texting. Some people may be OK with abbreviating everything; for me, that’s too hard to read.

10 – Hashtags and conferences go together. There’s no better way to promote one or report from one. However…

11 – …As recent events have shown, Twitter at meetings can lead to mean-spirited back-channel snark.

12 – Saved Search is handy for tracking subjects you’ll be writing about. I use it like Google News alerts.

13 – Trending Topics is worthless, unless you use it as an obituary tracker. Otherwise, it’s too easy to game.

14 – Spam, porn, phishing, malware, scams: as Twitter’s user base has grown, so has its smarmy underbelly.

15 – Twitter is a conversation, which means you can’t do all the talking. Stop, look, listen, and retweet.

16 – Twitter collapses the space between you and that famous publisher or CEO, but you still gotta make your case.

17 – Blogging and Twitter go together like cheese and crackers: you can have one without the other but it’s not as good.

That’s it. If you’ve used Twitter a year or longer, what wisdom can you share?

By the way, I wrote the first draft of this on Twitter in real time. It was easier than I thought.

As luck would have it, around the time I was getting ready to publish the results, I got the opportunity to write a guest post for TwiTip, a guide to all things Twitter run by Aussie blogging guru Darren Rowse, the mind behind ProBlogger.com.

So if you want to see the poll results, check out my TwiTip guest post here.

As more writers start using Twitter, use Twitter for different aspects of their business and take on assignments tweeting for clients, how many accounts you use and how you manage those accounts are definitely becoming points of discussion.

I’d love to hear what your experiences have been. If you have several Twitter accounts how do you keep them straight? How do you do it without having it take over your work life?

Last fall I started hearing more writers talk about using Twitter for work, so in December I signed up. It’s easy: you pick a user name and password, write a brief description of yourself, upload a photo to go with your profile and you’re in business – able to post messages of 140 characters at a time, sign up to follow other people and ask friends to follow you. Think of it as a pint-sized version of Facebook or LinkedIn, but heavier on the conversation.

People have likened Twitter to a cocktail party or a class reunion. To me it’s more like the scene out of Finding Nemo when the sea turtles catch a ride on the East Australian current – fast, fun and filled with bodies.

Since taking the plunge, I’ve discovered what my Twitter-using friends already had: it’s a good way to track down sources.

Here’s an example. Last week I did a news story for a trade magazine I write for regularly. I tweeted about the story once it ran, which is to say that after the story went online I posted a link to it on Twitter. People clicked on the link and that helped bump up the page views the story got on the magazine’s Website. I’m pretty sure that fact, plus the fact that it was breaking news and I turned it around quickly -  led my editor to call me when he got a tip on some other breaking news to see if I could do that story. I said yes and immediately put out a call out on Twitter for an industry expert – and got a response within 15 minutes. I turned in that story the same afternoon – not bad for a day’s work.

Once the second story was up, I posted a link to it on Twitter and a couple of the sources that I quoted broadcast it to their Twitter connections, or retweeted it in Twitter lingo. Ever since, professionals in that industry have been adding me to their Twitter connections, which adds to my pool of potential sources.

That’s the good stuff. Even so, Twitter still has its faults. People gossip, overshare, flog their businesses and themselves. All that’s easy enough to ignore. The biggest downside is how much of a time waster it can be – and that’s why it took me so long to start using it. It’s too easy to cross the line from trolling Twitter for sources to hanging out just to eavesdrop on the conversation.

Obviously that thought has occurred to other people because there are now a host of Twitter tools for people to use to read Twitter posts offline, send new comments through email, link directly to blogs, etc. – all in an effort to stay productive. I’ll take a look at some of those in coming weeks to see which ones are most useful for writers.

To other freelancers, if you’re using Twitter, how has it helped your writing business?