Thursday 14 July 2011

Starting out on Twitter

As mentioned in my previous post, I discovered that Twitter was a lot more useful than I previously suspected - and found that this blog post was great for giving me some practical advice on how to use Twitter. Some of the main points from that blog post are:

1. Find some good people to follow, and connect with plenty of them. I have to admit that I'm actually still only following a few people - although I would say some (e.g. CILIPinfo and, of course, CPD23) are very good. This is something I plan to build on over time. However, as I'm pretty new to Twitter I'm going to spend some time watching others before jumping in with too many of my own tweets!

2. Don't read every single tweet you get - treat it more like a real-time conversation. I think I learnt this one pretty quickly! I'll have a quick glance over the most recent tweets on my feed (perhaps the last few hours), then only properly look at the ones that are of interest to me. I'd say that this point is especially important as, where possible, I like reading the links, so certainly wouldn't have time to read them all.

3. Be selective in who you follow. This could be choosing people who follow you and your followers, who tweet interesting things, or people with an interesting bio. It's also good advice for new Twitter users - make sure you have an interesting bio/ picture, have a look at who else is following those you have decided follow, and make sure you post interesting tweets! Here I realise I need to follow my own advice a bit - I have added a bio and picture of myself, but haven't really looked at who else I could follow. I also haven't posted many tweets at all, so that should be my next move.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for linking to my blog Anna, and glad you found my post on current awareness useful! Hope you manage to get more use out of Twitter as you continue with cpd23.

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  2. Hi Anna,

    One tip I would give is to not read the links immediately unless you want to.

    I use Read It Later, other people use Instapaper or Delicious or you could even just add them to your browser favourites but it has certainly helped me to just read the tweets and save the links.

    Tina

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  3. Thanks for the tip Tina - am certainly beginning not to read all the links immediately, but will check out the tools you suggest!

    Ana

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