A brief guide to twitter
- 1. © John Iona A brief guide to Twitter Sign up for a Twitter account at twitter.com This is your Twitter @username, or handle. Depending on the use for the account, choose a username that reflects this. Set your details for your account. Find people & organisations to follow, whose tweets you are going to be interested in reading. Find people by using the search facility, but make sure you find the right (official) account. The more famous, the more “fake” accounts there will be.
- 2. © John Iona Try searching for organisations, publishers and people who you might be interested in following. Here are just a few suggestions: When looking for people to follow, search for publishers or authors that you know and see what comes up. If your search for a person/organisation doesn’t find the official account, try visiting their official website first. There you will often find icons/links that will take you to their official social media pages. Once you find someone you want to follow, take a look at the account and if you are happy, click the follow button to follow their tweets. People such as Phil Bradley, Geoff Barton and Michael Rosen. Publishers such as Penguin, Walker, Harper Collins and Spinebreakers. Authors such as Patrick Ness, Malorie Blackman, Alan Gibbons and Philp Ardagh. Orgnaisations such as National Literacy Trust, CILIP SLG, the Society of Authors and The Guardian teen books. Take a look at who others are following to get ideas of more people to follow.
- 3. © John Iona Your Twitter home page Including handles (@usernames) means the tweet shows up on their feed and is known as a mention. If someone mentions you, you get an alert here Re-tweets (RT) are tweets that people are sharing so that their followers can see them. #Hashtags used to keyword tweets so topics can be tweeted and searched easily.Tweets using the same #tag help a topic to trend Patrick Ness’s Twitter handle Hover over a tweet to get more options. Reply to a tweet and start a conversation with someone Re-tweet (RT) a tweet to share with this with the people that follow you. This tweet will then show on their timeline, even though they do not follow the original tweeter Favourite a tweet – this is an easy way to save a tweet to go back to it
- 4. © John Iona Tweeting as an organisation When creating a Twitter account for your Library, or department or follow the advice below: Only tweets of those that you follow … … will show up on your Twitter feed. While I don’t follow @norfolkbookworm, this tweet was re-tweeted by The Reading Agency, who I do follow. So any of your tweets, as well as anything you re-tweet, will show up on the feed of those that follow you. With this type of Twitter account, follow people whose tweets you think you will want to share with your followers. This will mean that the tweets on your feed are only those from those that might be relevant to your followers, and the feed is not too long. So any tweets from this account… …will show up on the feed of every follower of this account. HOWEVER You do not see the tweets of people you do not follow. So students can follow your account, and you do not have to worry about seeing their tweets… …unless you click follow
- 5. © John Iona Protecting Privacy Choose the settings option in the menu here Choose to protect your tweets here. Then save your changes. Now Twitter uses have to request to follow you. Your tweets, who you follow and who follows you remains private. You can then choose to only accept follow requests from relevant people. Some privacy advice for school libraries Set tweets to private and then let pupils, parents, teachers, governors follow you on request. You do not need to follow them back… as long as they follow you, they will see your tweets and you will not have to see theirs. Only follow accounts which will tweet about the sorts of things you will want to share (RT) with your followers so that your feed stays uncluttered and relevant. Share your Twitter handle (@username) with stakeholders so that they know how to find you.
- 6. © John Iona Having other people re-tweeting your message to their followers, will mean you reach more and more people. Follow people, and hope that they follow back.Try to tweet about the interesting work that you are doing, special events and feedback you have had from others. Tweet about positive, interesting stories from the media and on the web. Twitter is all about having a conversation, and sharing information, good practice, news and ideas. How can you use Twitter to your advantage? Tweet @people if you want a particular person to see your tweet. What do you want to share with your followers? Use Twitter to promote your Library events, new books, competitions, book trailers, photos, reviews and anything else you can think of to increase engagement.