If you subscribe to this blog or, indeed, if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I am an avid Twitter user. In a previous post entitled Twitter makes you clever, I set out my reasons why teachers should use Twitter, namely that I learn an inordinately large amount from using Twitter and that it keeps me connected to the latest developments in education from around the world.

On this occasion, I thought I would do my bit for the Tweeting Teachers cause by offering some advice, not only on how to start using Twitter, but also on how to turn Twitter into an essential tool for communication and professional development. Here it goes:

Twitter for beginners – What’s it all about?

• Sign up - Come on… you know you want to. If only to see what the fuss is all about.
• Follow people - Let’s face it, you’re not Stephen Fry, so people aren’t going to flock to you in the hundreds of thousands, so the onus is on you to start following as many relevant people as possible.
  If you are reading this, the chances are that you are a teacher or somehow involved in education, so a good place to start would be following me and then check out who I follow.
• Introduce yourself – It’s basic manners, really. Be nice. The people you’ve just followed will get an email notification telling them so and they will be deciding whether to follow you back or not. In order to do this, they’ll probably read your last tweets (not possible if you protect your updates) and your bio. It is essential that you fill in your bio so other people know what you are all about (many Twitter users don’t follow back folk without bios, as they often turn out to be spammers).
• Converse – Write @ in front of a username (no gaps) to address a tweet to a particular person. They will receive your tweet as a reply or a mention, depending on what means to access twitter they use. I don’t know about other people, but I am more likely to follow somebody who interacts and less likely to follow people who monologue.

• Share - As you have probably heard n times already ‘Twitter is one of the best CPD tools available…’ but it only becomes so if you converse and share! Pass on relevant bits of news and links to websites. Lots of links to interesting websites and resources on the internet will make you popular, guaranteed. Use the RT (ReTweet) facility to spread useful or relevant tweets from other users.

Intermediate Twitters – Getting the hang of it

• Tweet on the move – You can text tweets from your mobile phone and, if you have mobile internet you can read them too. iPhone users can download free apps such as Twitterfon or Tweetdeck.
• Expand - Use services such as Mr Tweet to find teachers and educators from around the world. If you’re a languages teacher, then you’ll know the importance of broadening horizons, if you’re not and you really need convincing, well… then Twitter is not for you.
• Don’t protect your updates to start with, as this might prevent people following you back. Do it if you must once you reach a sufficient amount of followers and followees, allowing Twitter to actually become useful.
• Block – If you don’t protect your updates, you will be followed by random nutters, spammers and other unsavoury characters. Don’t be afraid to block who you don’t like the sound of – in their profile, click on block on the right hand side column (I know it might be tempting to just leave them there because they boost your follower count… but really, block them… It’s not worth it and they deserve no better).
• Discern - What do you want Twitter for? Are you happy to listen and participate less? Or are you perhaps an active twitter (or is it twitterer?, I never know) who likes to converse? How you answer these questions may affect who and how many people you follow or unfollow. Pick and choose.

Advanced Twitters – Hooked

• Use a twitter client – These are downloadable applications which allow you to manage your Twitter account(s). My current favourites are Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop, both of which support Facebook and TwitPic integration.
• Group followers – Following many people or being followed by many people can create problems with keeping up with all those tweets. Some people create several accounts and select whom they follow in each. I find an easier way is to create groups for different users in a twitter client (see previous point). This means that you can add selected users to a group to ensure you never miss their tweets.
• Manage followers – Once you have been using Twitter for a while it may be that there are some people you never followed back for one reason or another (you’re too busy, no bio, etc). You can trawl trough your followers list on Twitter to check who is following you and whether you follow them back. Alternatively, an easier way to do this is to use a service such as Friend or Follow or Twitter Grader, which allow you to see at a glance who follows you and who you don’t follow back, or vice versa.
• Use hash tags – Just like adding @ to a user name directs a tweet to a particular user, adding a hash tag # to a topic ensures that you can later track all the tweets about that particular topic, even from people you don’t follow.

• Follow even more people – Many people will disagree with me on this last point, as they are happy following a limited amount of people. I am sure they have valid reasons to keep their follower count low, I am only proposing that Twitter becomes more and more useful the more relevant people you follow (stress relevant!). Why learn from one ten when you can learn from a hundred? Why learn from one hundred when you can learn from a thousand?

I realise Twitter is not for everyone, but I do think everyone should try it before they dismiss it as irrelevant chatter or inane tittle-tattle. If that is all you see in Twitter, then you’re not using it right.

Have you any more advice for teachers new to Twitter? How does Twitter help you?

Your comments are, as always, most welcome.

Cover photo from Flickr – Kaushal

This post is tagged twitter