Week 2: Social Networking (Twitter)

Twitter is a micro-blogging service (think mini, 140-character blog posts!) that allows you to send and receive short, snappy messages called tweets. You can follow other people and see their tweets on your homepage. It is a way to create a customizable, real-time, personal newsfeed.

How is Twitter useful?

• Current awareness: many use it to receive breaking news.
• Networking: connect with people who share similar interests. Follow local personalities, groups and businesses to know what is going on in your community.
• Marketing: promote programs, events or workshops to a large audience quickly. Showcase new books and other items of interest.
• Updating: let people know of any changes to services or open hours, library closures and catalogue downtimes.
• Sharing: tweet images and links to interesting articles and websites
• Spread the news: using the retweet (RT) function is a great way to spread news and ideas in a word-of-mouth style.

 
Terminology

• Tweet: A noun AND a verb. A 140-character message and the act of posting it.
• Follow: “Follow” people to subscribe to their tweets.
• Feed: The stream of tweets you see on your homepage is made up of updates from users you follow.
• Handle: Your username.
• @: place it before someone’s handle to address a public message to them.
• Retweet (RT): to indicate that your tweet was originally posted by another user.
• Hashtag (#): use to categorize your tweet so it is grouped with tweets of the same tag. A hashtag allows others to find your tweet based on its topic.

(Twitter has a full glossary here)

For more information, watch the video below and take a look at the Help section on Twitter.

 

THING #4 – Set up a Twitter account

Unless someone has set their privacy settings otherwise, you can view people’s Twitter posts without creating an account and logging in. In order to contribute and set up your own feed, you will need to create an account.

Go to twitter.com and enter your details in the New to Twitter boxes. Follow the prompts to activate your accounts.

 

 

THING #5 – Find library related accounts to follow

 

There are so many accounts on Twitter (over 140 million and growing!) that it can be overwhelming to find people to follow. You can follow people you know at first, then branch out and find someone who posts information you’re interested in. When using Twitter, don’t just follow the people you like, follow the information you want!

Start by finding library related accounts to follow. Need inspiration? Try searching for libraries, favourite authors, publishers or professional journals. Find someone with similar interests and see who they are following.

THING #6 – Tweet

Now that you have had a chance to see what others are tweeting, it is time to join in the conversation. Click on the icon in the top-right



Compose a 140-character message and post. Try adding a hashtag (#NB23) or directing your message (@…) to another NB23 participant.

If you see an interesting tweet, click Reply and add your two cents or use Retweet to post it for your own followers to see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

***Don't forget to write a blog post about this week's Things on your blog!***

 

 

Cool Extra Thing – Tools for Twitter efficiency

There are tools to help you manage your Twitter account. Some of them even let you manage your other online accounts, like Facebook, LinkedIn etc. in one place.

Tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck let you schedule tweets to post ahead of time. Crowdbooster lets you track retweets, see how far your tweets are reaching and other stats.

What is HootSuite?

 

Try these tools. Which one do you think is more useful?