Thing 7: Taking Twitter further

(Before we start, I've had a couple of emails about pictures or videos not showing up in the emails - if you just click on the title of each post, within the email, it'll take you to read the post on the actual 23 Things blog itself. It's always worth doing this, as all embedded content will display properly.)

In Thing 6, we set up Twitter accounts. Now it's time to talk about what to do with them.

Image via Iconfinder.com

Activity: Three tasks do to right away

When most people join Twitter, they don’t know whether they’ll stick with it or not. For this reason, they often start following a few people before they’ve really set up their profile, and this can actually end up being detrimental to their twitter experience.

The reason is, when you start following someone, in most cases they get an email saying ‘X is now following you’ – this email includes your bio, your pic, and a link to your profile. If you don’t have a bio, your only tweet is something along the lines of ‘Don’t really understand this twitter lark!’, and your picture is the default twitter egg, chances are they won’t follow you back. And seeing as you’ve gone out of your way to identify key people to follow first of all, this is potentially a huge missed opportunity to engage with people who you’d get a lot out of chatting to.

So to avoid this, and generally get off on the RIGHT foot on Twitter, here are 3 very simple things to do right away, as soon as you join, and before you do anything else - it should only take you 5 minutes:

1. Put in a picture, preferably a head-shot. If you’re really camera shy then put in a picture of a robot or whatever, but put in SOMETHING – lots of people refuse to follow anyone with the twitter egg, right off the bat. Twitter is a personal medium – even if you’re only using it for professional networking, you really need a picture of yourself up there.
2. Put in a proper, engaging bio. Remember, people get emailed when you follow them. Oh, who is this new follower and shall I follow them back? I don’t know who they are because they’ve not put in a bio – so I won’t bother. Twitter is about connecting with people – use the bio to say something about yourself, which will make the kinds of people who you want to connect with, want to connect with you. Try and avoid ‘reluctant twitterer’ or similar as the last sentence.
3. Write a couple of tweets. I know it seems silly to broadcast tweets to no one, but you need to give people something to go on when they’re deciding whether to follow you back. Everyone’s first tweet is roughly ‘Am trying twitter out – hello world!’ or something along those lines, and that’s fine, no one expects your first tweet to be a work of 140 character genius. But follow that up with something more meaningful, perhaps about what you want to get out of Twitter, the types of professionals you want to tweet with, or maybe a link to a really useful article or piece of information.
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Just do those 3 simple steps and you’ll hit the ground running, and have more chance of developing relationships with people who matter to you.

Some tips for new Tweeters

Once you're there, the absolutely key thing to remember is that Twitter is all about conversation. Getting the most out of it means developing a network of people you want to converse with. Run searches on the things you're interested in to find out who is saying stuff worth listening to. If you see someone talking a lot of sense, start following them!

Cannibalise the follow lists of people you like. So for example, if you are an Information Professional, you’ll probably know of a few people on Twitter than you can start following right away. But also look at the people they follow and start following the most interesting looking of them, and then do the same again, and so on, till you’ve got a decent sized group of interesting people. (If you’re on the Library side of things, feel free to cannibalise mine – most of the people I follow are great… Just click on the link that says Following on my profile.)

Don’t just follow the Queen Bee, follow the workers too. Many, many tweets are @ replies. This means they begin with @[Insert Person's Twitter name here] and are consequently only seen by people following both the tweeter and the person they are tweeting at. So you could miss fantastic conversations if you’re only following one of the parties – they simply won’t appear in your twitter stream. Therefore, if you really like someone on Twitter, follow the people they interact with too, so you increase your chances of serendipitous interesting conversation overhearing...

Give of yourself, from the start. If Twitter ends up working for you, you’ll end up being yourself. You’ll end up sharing more than just work stuff, probably, and being closer to your true personality than you might imagine – more unguarded. You have to make up your own mind if you’re happy to be unguarded online, and how unguarded you are going to be. But the point is, don’t be shy and don’t try and hide your personality – people want personality, they’ll forgive quirks if they get more character from you (and therefore more value), and as I say if you’re here for the long haul it’ll happen eventually anyway. Just be yourself from the start.

Tweet links to your stuff. / Tweet links to other people’s stuff. Twitter provides a large percentage of hits to the blogs I write. You can tweet links to your own 23 Things blog. But don’t, whatever you do, just use Twitter to self-promote. People will suss you out and switch off pretty quickly. People will be interested in what you have to say if you tweet links to a broad range of useful, pertinent stuff.

ReTweet. Don’t assume everyone else will have seen what you’ve seen. If something’s really worth reading, ReTweet it so that your followers can all read it – they may not follow the person who originally said it, or they may not have been online when it was said. Plug people in to the good content. What you want to achieve overall is a blend of useful information, thoughts, links, character and responses to other tweets. Don’t be afraid to jump into conversations, either – certain people I follwed for ages without them reciprocating, but as soon as I @ replied to one of their tweets they started following me too because I demonstrated some value to them; we’ve since gone on to chat all the time.

Don’t ever criticise your employer! Twitter is personal – but don’t forget that unless you lock down your account, anyone can read it. There’s nothing to be gained from venting your frustration at your institution via this medium – just resist the temptation! (I know this is obvious, but you wouldn't believe how often it happens.)

You never know who may end up reading it. Or who may end up not seeking you out to give you an opportunity later. Generally speaking, unless you are going to tweet anonymously, discretion is the better part of valour when it comes to criticism of all kinds – by all means give an opinion, but always run this test before you tweet something harsh about an individual: would I say this to their face?

Investigate clients . I must admit, I’ve mostly found Twitter’s homepage adequate for my needs. But many people use clients, that access Twitter but present the information in a better or different way – try Tweetdeck for example (and you can sync that with Twitter on your phone and tablet, too).

For more info on the nuts and bolts of it, check out Twitter’s official guide.

Finally, you may come across terms to do with Twitter with which you're unfamiliar - the glossary included as part of the Twitter for Researchers guide produced by the Library, may be useful:

Twitter for research by University of York Information

If you want to, write a blog post about whether you think Twitter will be useful to you, what you want to get out of it and, if you use it already, what works and what doesn't.

Thing 6: Setting up a Twitter account

It's Twitter time! Please don't instantly run away - I promise Twitter can be incredibly useful for people in our industry...

In fact, before we go any further, here's a slide-deck I made a while ago about the common reasons people give for NOT using Twitter, and what my answer is to all of them...

7 Reasons People Give For Not Using Twitter And Why They Can All Be Rebuffed With The Phrase: It's a Conversation from Ned Potter

(By the way, if you're subscribing to this blog via email, it's always worth clicking on the title of each blog post so you're taken to the online version - this will mean you see all the pictures properly, and embedded presentations, videos etc.)

What is it?

Twitter is a short-form blogging platform which allows users to exchange public messages of 140 characters or less, known as Tweets. Tweets can be entirely text-based or they can contain multimedia such as images or video, and links to anything online. Tweeting is possible via desktop computer, phone, tablet, etc.

 

Your tweets are seen by other Twitter users who follow you; you see the tweets of users you follow. You can quickly build up a network of peers with shared interests. There are around half a billion Twitter users worldwide.

Why use it?

It is a brilliant, brilliant networking tool. It's great for connecting with useful people, chatting to people who work in the same jobs elsewhere, keeping in touch with new contacts, disseminating information about what you do, and above all (for me, anyway) getting help.

I use Twitter literally every day to help me with my job - I ask questions of people who are in the same role as me or who have done the things I'm doing before, and know what works and what doesn't. (For example, before launching this 23 Things programme I talked to friends on Twitter from Warwick and Oxford who have run them internally before.) Twitter has been vital for everything interesting that has happened to me professionally.


On Twitter the information comes to you, and allows you to keep up with new ideas and developments in your field. It allows you to develop (it enables CPD) beyond the confines of the specific role you do in your 9-5 job (or 9-5:24, in our case...). You can talk to people in real time or they can pick up tweets later, meaning you can chat to people across different time zones.

Plus, Twitter is a fantastic funnel for all your other social media presences (when you get them).

Activity: sign up! 

We'll go into a bit more detail about how to use Twitter next week, but for now the Thing 6 activity, which should take around 5 - 10 minutes, is just to sign up. If you already have an account, just put your feet up and relax.

First go to Twitter.com, put your name, email and a password into the box on the home-screen, and follow the steps from there. Keep in mind you'll need to choose a Twitter name that no one else has used yet. Shorter is better if possible. 

Two words of warning - the 'Captcha' system Twitter uses (where you get shown two words written in a distorted way, which you have to enter into a box to prevent spam) is notoriously tricky - you may need to try a few times (or press the button to request a new set of words to attempt) before it works. It'll lock you out for an hour if you get it wrong loads of times - I'm sorry about this, hopefully it won't happen but if it does please do try again later! The second thing is, Twitter tries to get you to follow 10 people when you first join. It's trying to be helpful, but it isn't - no one knows who 10 useful people are when they're new to Twitter, and it takes ages, and really you need a profile picture and a bio before you start following people. So my advice is, when it starts doing this, just delete everything in the URL after Twitter.com. The address will be Twitter.com/blahblahblah - whatever it says where I've put blahblahblah, just delete it and press they Return key. Twitter will then forget about trying to make you follow 10 people and leave you to your own devices... 

If you want to save some time on Thing 7, go into the settings of your new Twitter account and put in a short bio, and a picture. 

Next time we'll look at who to follow, what to Tweet, and how to get the most out of the platform. 

Thing 5: A social media primer

Welcome to the first of four social media Things. This first one provides an overview of what social media is and how it works, and outlines some of the important platforms - we'll be looking in more depth at Twitter and Google + later on.

What is it?

The term 'Social media' refers to any kind of online platform where users can exchange stuff (sometimes known as User Generated Content). That stuff can be views, opinions, pictures, videos, presentations. Social media is interactive, so because people can leave comments on your blogposts, your blogs are social media.

Facebook and Twitter probably the two most famous social networks - they're the two most popular at this time, certainly. The numbers are huge, and among younger demographics more people use social media than use email. Here's a video with a suitably dramatic soundtrack to give you some mind-spinning facts and figures:

Why is it useful?

There are a HUGE number of information professionals, both in IT and Libraries, on social media. It therefore acts as a way to increase the network of people you can call upon to help and advise and encourage you professionally. In the same way that you might look up from your PC and ask your colleagues how best to do something, you can ask hundreds or thousands of colleagues the same question around the world. It's like a human Google, where instead of an algorithm bringing back the answer, it's a trusted network of your peers.

Using social media also keeps you up to date with your field. Because you're plugged into a network of information professionals, important knowledge comes to you without you having to go out and find it - for example interesting conferences or training coming up, calls for papers, new tools and technologies, trends in academia and so on. I occasionally teach courses on emerging trends and technologies and when people ask how I keep with all the new platforms and ideas, the boring but true answer is always: I'm on Twitter. That's enough.

Having an online presence is very easy with social media, and that makes it attractive to people who want to build their professional reputations. Social media allows you to showcase your knowledge and expertise, and to connect with people who have relevant interests. It's a great leveller - for example on Twitter you can talk to everyone from people just starting out in our professions, to people who run libraries, IT departments, and even Universities.

Activity: Get an overview of the big social networks 

This Thing's activity is very simple - you really just need to read to the end of this post! Then anyone curious can sign up to some of the platforms I'm about to describe, if they want to, and have a play around - it's entirely up to you. As I say we'll be setting up accounts for Twitter and Google+ over the next couple of weeks, so this primer only covers the other major platforms. 

Facebook is the big one - it has over 1 billion active accounts. It's a social network where people exchange pictures, status updates, and so on; you know all this because you're probably on it already...

YouTube is the main site for sharing videos, and it is huge; as the video says above it's the second most searched site everyday. In other words Yahoo!, Bing, all of these search engines that search the entire web, still don't get as many searches as YouTube does just for videos. 72 hours of video are uploaded every minute. In one year YouTube the same number of views as if every single human on earth watched 140 videos each. Etc etc. The other major video sharing site is Vimeo, which provides a smaller, somewhat classier alternative to YouTube. 

LinkedIn is the main social network for business, and for career minded people. It's primarily an opportunity to showcase your CV, but people also use the many groups and discussion forms to chat about professional issues. LinkedIn results show up incredibly high in Google, so it's worth having an account just so people who Google you find your professional activities near the top! 

Academia.edu is minuscule compared to the giants of social media we're discussing here - but we're including it anyway as it's so relevant to working in a University. Academia essentially tries to sell itself as an academic Facebook, and indeed you can use it that way - set a up a profile, interact with other users and so on. But you can just use it to find out about papers being published in the areas you're interested in - authors often put early versions online at Academia.edu before they're published in journals. You can also talk directly to those authors. 

Honourable mentions go to Pinterest (an increasingly popular place for curating and sharing multimedia, usually pictures), FourSquare (a geolocation site which takes advantage of the fact that your smartphone knows where you are, allowing you to 'check in' to physical locations), Flickr (the main image sharing site, other than Facebook) and good old MySpace (many libraries experimented with MySpace when it first came out, often with fairly rubbish results - although much maligned, MySpace has attempted to reinvent itself as a primarily music-based network, and actually still gets over 70,000,000 unique visitors per month). 

Blogging

If you have time, write a short blog (or long!) blog post about whether you think social media is for you, which platforms you're on and what you use them for, and which you might join in the future.