Last updated:
04 February 2010
MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Micro-blogging
Part 1: Introduction
If you want to keep in constant touch with people,
find out what they are up to, as well as tell them what you are
doing, or if you need an immediate answer to a problem or issue,
then a micro-blogging service might be what you need.
There are a number of
micro-blogging services. These let you write brief text updates (of
up to 140 characters) and broadcast them. People then sign up to
follow your messages and you can sign up to follow others and
receive their messages.
Whereas many people can see the value of
micro-blogging as a tool to support informal learning, educators and
others are still exploring its use. Here are couple of useful
articles:
Twitter lets you
write brief text updates (of up to 140 characters) and broadcast
them. People then sign up to follow your messages (aka "updates" or
"tweets") and you sign up to follow others.
You can receive information, news
and much more from colleagues, friends, celebrities, politicians as
well as companies and services. You can share your
own news, links or even ask a question of your followers. Tweet
about a conference or event
Watch this video (from CommonCraft), which
explains Twitter in Plain English.
The best way to find out what you think is to
experience it yourself.
1 -
Sign up for a Twitter account
Go to
www.twitter.com and sign up. You will need
to choose a unique username. During the sing-up process, Twitter
will suggest some people to follow. You can uncheck them if you
want to. Your Twitter home page will now be set up.
Your profile page will also be set
up (Select Profile). It will have a unique web
address, ie. www.twitter.com/yrusername and will show
information about you, who you are following and who is following
you. It will also display your recent tweets (known as your
timeline).
2 - Customise your profile
page
Select Settings.
Write something about yourself. and ideally, upload a picture,
avatar or logo, and customise the look your Twitter page. Note: If
you want to, you can protect your profile to keep your tweets
private, and approve those who can follow you.
3 - Write your first tweet
Remember it can only be up to 140
characters long. Remember, too, that no one will receive this tweet;
because no one is following you, but at least it will put something
onto your timeline so it is not empty.
When you are on the website, the
input box looks like this - and you can see the characters count
down from 140 as you type your message.
4 - Find people
to follow
You can establish contacts with people by
“following” them and this means you will receive their tweets. Who
you follow is completely up to you. Take a look at their profile
page and their recent tweets and decide if they are someone you
would like to interact with. If you are looking for a good deal of
interaction with people, then it might be a good idea to avoid
choosing people who have masses of followers, as they are unlikely
to have the time to interact with everyone on an individual basis.
If you are looking for a list of learning
professionals, on Twitter, then the
Connexions Directory
is a good place to start:
When people follow you – and by default you will
get an email notification when this happens – you shouldn’t feel
obliged to follow them back. And as for how many people you should
follow, that again is up to you and what you feel you can handle.
Some people only like to follow a small number, others can cope with
hundreds if not thousands.
NOTE 1: If it gets too "noisy", you can stop
following someone by going to their profile page, and clicking the
right arrow beside the button that says Following. This will open
another box with a Remove button on it. Click that to stop following
their updates.
NOTE 2: If you don’t want someone
to follow you, e.g. a spammer, than you can easily block that
person.
5 - Send someone a tweet
Target a message at a tweeter by
inserting @ in front of their Twitter name (e.g. “@c4lpt I agree”).
Note all your followers will see this message.
6 - Send a direct message
to someone
To send a a contact (which only
the named contact will see) by using d in front of their Twitter
name), e.g. “d c4lpt how are you?”
7 - Retweet someone else's
tweet
If you are reposting the complete
tweet, "RT" or "Retweeting" at the beginning. If you are sharing
the tweet and but adding your own thoughts, changing it somehow then
use "via"
8 - Share a web link
Don't use the full URL (unless it
is short), reduce it in size using a service like
tinyurl.com or
bit.ly which lets you keep track of hits on the
URL
9 - Display a Twitter
badge
If you have a blog or website, you
could place a
Twitter badge on it that displays your
latest tweets, This is a useful way for people to find out you are
on Twitter, and to follow you if they want. Twitter provides a
number of different types of badges to embed on your blog or web
page. The badge you choose will depend upon if you can use
Javascript on your site, or whether only Flash is allowed.
10 - Watch Twitter trends
If you want to
see what's the hottest news (i.e. the current most used words), take
a look at the trending topics, visible in the right-hand column of
your profile page. Click on a trend to see the real-time results
for this trend. To search for a topic, go to
http://search.twitter.com.
Watch this video from
Commoncraft to see how Twitter Search creates new opportunities for
business feedback, tracking news in real time and discovering
trends.
11 - Use #hashtags
#hashtags are
often used to categorise or tag content, i.e. a number of people all
agree to use the same word so that their related tweets can be
grouped together, e.g. #abcdef. See what's happening on Twitter at
hashtags.org
12 - Use a Twitter client
Although most people use their web
page to write and receive their tweets, there are a range of other
ways to do this. For instance, you could use a Firefox add-on like
Twitterfox, or a desktop client like
Twhirl.
13 - Twitter on your mobile phone
You
can access Twitter on your mobile phone at
http://m.twitter.com. You can
also use your phone to send and receive tweets via SMS. There are
Twitter clients for iPhone and Blackberry
14 - Find other great
Twitter 3rd party apps
There are lots of Twitter apps to
help you do much more with Twitter, e.g.
Keep track of what’s being
said about you and/or your company, by using
tweetscan.com
Find out about other Twitter
applications. There are lots of 3rd party applications that work
with Twitter. See some of them here:
Twitter applications
15 - How are you going to use Twitter?
How are you going to use Twitter? Here are
some suggestions
Think about the types of tweets you might
want to write: Rodd Lucier has also posted about
Top 10 Types of Tweets, which
might give you some food for thought.
Think about your engagement formula:
Angela Maiers, for instance, uses
the 70-20-10 rule. 70% is sharing resources, 20% is
collaborations and 10% is chit-chat.
140University - daily knowledge nuggets plus links to
explanatory resources delivered via Twitter or Facebook - in
less than 140 characters
140 Learning Centre - daily
knowledge and skills nuggets plus links to explanatory
resources delivered via Twitter or Yammer - in less than 140
characters - to
support and improve your personal productivity and
performance in the workplace
17 - Twitter at a Conference
Twitter is
often used at conferences and events to provide a backchannel
for the event. Find out the hashtag that's being used.
Jonathan
Hewitt (hackademic,
26 June 2009) has a corporate
Twitter policy that has the extra added benefit of being itself
twitterable: "Our Twitter policy: Be
professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well.
Remember that you can’t control it once you hit 'update.' "
For more about use of socialmedia tools, see
Social media
guidelines