fs2016

Twitter is ephemeral. Tweets are short, throwaway observations, which capture the present moment, flow past quickly and are succeeded by more recent and relevant ones. We’ve looked at a way to favourite tweets, and to bookmark the URLs they may contain, but once you’ve done this, why would you want to keep a tweet? Why would you want to tweet in advance, rather than in the moment?

The Past
You can scroll through your last few thousand tweets or so (which might cover quite a span of time, depending on how prolific you are) but searching and looking at hashtags won’t take you back very far, only a few days. And yet… although finding past tweets might be difficult, they can come back to haunt you. If you want to find a tweet, it might be quite tricky, and yet if you want a tweet to disappear, someone may be able to dig it up!

Deleting Tweets
Let’s look first at deleting. You can delete your own tweets, by hovering over it and using the option that appears below next to ‘reply’, ‘retweet’, etc. If you make a mistake in a tweet, it might be less confusing to send another tweet with a correction rather than delete one that people may already have seen. If you tweet something you shouldn’t… well, don’t! However, you can’t delete someone else’s tweets, so if they’ve already retweeted you, taken a screenshot, or archived the tweet using some of the options below, it might be too late!

But what if you want to keep tweets, either your own or someone else’s? Why might you want to do this?

• Perhaps a discussion on Twitter helped you to think something through, and you want to keep the discussion so you can work it up into a blog post, or integrate it into a chapter or article later
• Maybe there was a good twitter ‘backchannel’ of livetweeting at a conference or other event, which you want to preserve either for yourself or others
• Perhaps you want to preserve a selection of good advice or observations on a topic, when you ‘crowdsourced’ – asked for suggestions on Twitter and got some great responses. You might want to keep and share them with others.

Tweet URLs
You can save a link to individual tweets. Each tweet has its own URL. To find this, you click on the date (or number of hours since the tweet was posted if this is less than a day).

This will open a new tab/window for that single tweet which contains the URL. You can copy and paste this URL, or save it, bookmark it, embed it in a website, or email it to people.

This might not be the best or most convenient way to present tweets for others though.

Your Twitter Archive
If you want a copy of all your tweets, then Twitter can send you an archive of everything you’ve tweeted. Click on the gear icon, and select ‘Settings’. In your ‘Account’ page, scroll down to the bottom where you will see an option to download your archive:

Storify
However, one of the nicest ways to keep tweets, especially for others, is a third party application called Storify. Storify is the tool which makes a narrative overview of tweets and other social media by linking to content on the web, including tweets, websites and blogs, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, or photos on Flickr. You can search for content, drag and drop it into a linear narrative, add some comments to contextualise it, and publish it on the web or share the URL. You are linking to the original source, rather than taking the content, so it doesn’t breach copyright. It automatically notifies people whose content you have used in this way, so if they object to your use, you can edit out their material (all the material visible to Storify is publically visible anyway).

Storify is a really nice way to create and share a summary of tweets and other online material around an event or discussion, such as a conference, blog or livechat. Storify is the tool I used to create a summary of the first week of #HSLU10DoT on Day Five.

The Future
And what about future tweets?

You can schedule tweets to send themselves automatically later on. You can’t do this from Twitter itself, but will need to use one of the additional apps mentioned in Days Eight and Nine, so you may wish to leave this topic for later if you want to consolidate the basics first.

Although Twitter is a medium which captures the moment, there are several reasons why you might want to schedule tweets for a later time.

• If your following contains people in a different time zone who are most likely to be online in the middle of the night, and you want to catch their attention
• If you have collected a lot of links you want to share, but don’t want to overwhelm your followers with lots of tweets at once
• If you want to tweet repeated information, updates or reminders, perhaps about an event you’re organising, a blog or article you’ve written or a deadline for a job or funding opportunity, without having to remember to do it (I’ve made use of this frequently throughout this programme!)
• If you’re away or busy but want to keep some presence on Twitter

You can schedule tweets from both Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. To schedule a tweet in Tweetdeck, for example, write a tweet as normal, and then click on ‘Schedule Tweet’. This brings up a small calendar, where you can choose the time and date when you want your tweet to be sent.

If you don’t use Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, there are other apps which only schedule tweets. You might try, for example, Futuretweets or Twuffer or also Buffer (which works for other social media too). You can sign in with Twitter (or Facebook, or LinkedIn), and it will ask you for permission to access your Twitter feed. Once signed in, it will ask you what you want to share. Type in a tweet, and click ‘schedule’ or ‘buffer’. You will want to go to the ‘Schedule’ tab and set the time zone, and the day and time you want to tweet!

There’s quite a bit there to play with! Well, that’s the last of our Ten Days of Twitter, but don’t worry if you’re still catching up – so are others, and the conversation will be continuing on #HSLU10DoT for quite some time, I hope! You might like to keep an eye on the programme hashtag and support learning developer colleagues as they learn how to use Twitter. I hope you’ve found the programme useful, and thanks for joining in! Keep tweeting!

(If you’ve experimented with Twitter and decided it’s not for you, then I hope we’ve helped you come to a better understanding of what it is, and a well informed decision on whether to use it or not. If you now want to delete your account, it’s easy to do so. We encourage you to keep your digital footprint tidy!).

Best wishes
@cinigabellini

If you’re choosing who to follow effectively, then your Twitter feed should be full of interesting tweets and links to webpages etc. which you might want to follow up on. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, lose track of it all, miss things and mislay things!

Twitter itself has a few features which can help you stay on top of all the information.

Likes (formerly Favourites)
If you see a tweet which interests you and which you’d like to come back to later, you can ‘like’ it and it will be stored for you to return to. To ‘like’, simply click on the Heart icon:

When you want to look at your liked tweets, you will see them marked in your Twitter stream, but it’s easier to see them all together. If you click on the top tab with the profile icon and ‘Me’ you will see your ‘likes’ as well as your tweets, followers and following. Click on ‘Likes’ to view. When you like a tweet, the person who tweeted it is notified, which may help to gain you an extra follower, but it also gives them feedback on what others are finding useful.

If you set up a Tweetdeck account yesterday, you can also add a column for your ‘liked’ tweets.

Search
You can also search for tweets, by username, hashtag or just by a keyword. The search box is at the top of the screen in the right hand corner. You can also organise the search results by top (most popular) topics, all results, or limit the results just to the people you follow. Once you have searched, a small ‘settings’ cog icon will appear next to the ‘search’ box (not the main cog icon at the top right of the screen!). If this is a search you might repeat regularly, click on this, and you can save the search so you don’t need to keep performing it – useful if you’re following a hastagged discussion. You could also perform an advanced search using this icon- you can narrow down the tweets you’re looking for by word or by the person sending or receiving it, or by location.

Curated Timeline Content
Whereas traditionally, Tweets appeared in your timeline in reverse chronological order (i.e. with the most recent at the top), Twitter now decides which Tweets you will find most important. Twitter will select ‘Tweets you are likely to care about most will show up first in your timeline. We choose them based on accounts you interact with most, Tweets you engage with, and much more’.

Should you wish to disable this feature, you can do so by removing the ‘tick’ in the appropriate option in Settings:

Extras:

If you’re keen to explore further, you might look at the following tips, or you might return to them later on, when you’ve been using Twitter for a while:

Third party applications
If you’re feeling more adventurous again today, here are a few more third party apps which will help you curate all the links which people are tweeting about.

Tweetdeck
If you explored Tweetdeck yesterday, you may not have realised that not only can you add columns for lists of people, you can also add columns to follow hashtags. Click on ‘Add column’, and then choose ‘Search’. If you perform a search for a hashtag, you can add a new column to your Tweetdeck which will now display all the tweets using that hashtag, whether you follow the people using it or not. This might be useful if you are following a conference hashtag or chat such as #LTHEchat but don’t want to follow all of the people tweeting with this hashtag.

Pocket
Pocket is an application which saves any webpape and blog posts for you to look at in more detail later, when you have time, also when you are offline. It is a bookmarking tool – if you find a webpage via a link in Twitter (or anywhere else), you can save it to Pocket, and then return to it and the other things you’ve saved later on. Moreover you can tag your saved content. Pocket is a web browser based service, meaning you can access it from anywhere and any device or computer.  To find out more about Pocket, and how to set up an account, see instructions in its ‘help’ section.

Flipboard
If you use a smartphone or tablet such as an iPhone, iPad or Android device, you could download an app which curates content from your Twitter feed, such as Flipboard. Once you have downloaded the app, you can connect it with your Twitter account (or other social media) and it will draw in the links that people share with you and display them for you. To find out more about Flipboard, and how to set up an account, see instructions in its ‘support’ section.

Activity for Day 9:
So there are a range of ways to stay on top of all the information that’s being shared with you by the people you follow. Choose one that looks useful to you, and experiment with it! Tweet to let us know your thoughts and findings!

Over the last seven days, you may have found that as you continue to use Twitter, you come across more and more interesting people to follow, and your following also grows exponentially. Keeping track of them all can be a challenge, and sometimes you will want to focus on certain groups of them over others, or check in on some people only sporadically. This is hard to do in the undifferentiated stream of tweets on your Twitter feed, where they are all mixed in together. Fortunately, there are ways to split up your Twitter stream and group the people you follow into separate streams, so you can keep an eye on their tweets as it suits you.

You might want to group the people you follow into any of the types that we looked at in Day 3. Some examples might be

• Colleagues or services at your institution
• Colleagues and peers across the country/world in a particular field
• Course participants
• Professional or funding bodies
• News accounts
• Social, personal or fun accounts

Twitter lists

Twitter has a feature which allows you to make lists of people – and you need not follow all of them to add them to a list. These lists can be private, so only you can see them, or they might be public so you can share them with others. I created such a list for the participants of this course on Day 2, so you could find each other on Day 3. You might create such a list for the benefit of others, for example, to bring together the attendees at a workshop or conference, students on a particular programme or module, or the top accounts on a particular topic which you recommend other people should follow. You can share a list by giving people the URL of the list page, or let them view the lists you’ve created on your profile, where they can subscribe to your lists too.

To create a list on Twitter, click on your small Profile Picture at the top of the screen, and select ‘Lists’, and you will see a page which will contain any lists you will make. Click on ‘Create list’, and you will be asked to name your new list and add a brief description. This description will be very helpful if you now choose to make the list public, so others can find and subscribe to it. You will now be invited to search for people to add to your list. You can also add them later, by clicking on their @name and going to their profile. If you click on the Gear Wheel you will see a menu containing the option ‘add or remove from lists’.

To view your lists, or those of other people, you can simply go to ‘lists’ on your ‘Me’ tab (one of the options across the top), and see only the tweets from the people in that list.

Block, Report and Mute
While we’re on the topic of managing people, you can also block or report people, for example, if you are followed by a spam account or someone you don’t want following you. Blocking accounts on Twitter tells you how you can block or mute activities from unwanted or undesirable accounts.

Extras
If you’re keen to explore further, you might look at the following tips, or you might return to them later on, when you’ve been using Twitter for a while:

Third Party Apps
The beauty of Twitter is in its simplicity as a platform. However, sometimes you need a bit more functionality. You might want a more convenient way to view different aspects of your Twitter stream, or even add in updates from other platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn together with Twitter, so your whole social media stream is visible in one place. To do this, you can use one of the third party applications that were developed to make Twitter easier to use.

Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is owned by Twitter, and is a good way to manage more than one account, if you have more than one (for personal and professional use, or perhaps an individual one and an official one on behalf of an institution). I am using Tweetdeck to tweet from @HSLU10DoT  and  @ZentrumLL at the moment, without having to log out of one account and into another – and it’s easy to get confused and tweet from the wrong one! However, you can also use Tweetdeck to split your Twitter stream into columns divided by people. It will import any lists you have made on Twitter too. Moreover you can schedule Tweets (that is what I am doing for the daily tasks).

You will need to create an account, with an email address and password. Once you have set up an account, you can connect your Twitter account(s). You can use it as a web-based application to access from anywhere, or you can download the Tweetdeck app to your computer (there is no app for smartphones or tablets). Tweetdeck is organised into a number of columns, and gives you a number of columns automatically, such as your timeline, your own tweets or your @mentions (tweets that mention you), and you can add new columns for the lists you create. You can also create new lists in Tweetdeck. Click on ‘add column’, and choose ‘lists’ (or any other column you want to add!).

You can do everything we’ve covered in Twitter on Tweetdeck too, including shortening URLs. Tweetdeck also makes some other things in Twitter a little bit easier.

Hootsuite
Hootsuite is similar application to Tweetdeck, but it allows you also to import other social media accounts such as Facebook, and it is also available as an app for mobile devices. You can sign up using Facebook, or if you prefer to keep Facebook separate from your professional social media use, you can sign up with an email address, name and password. It will then ask you to add your chosen social network accounts. You can then add streams of content similarly as in Tweetdeck, and tabs for the different social networks. Hootsuite has a quick start guide to help you set up your account.

The other bonus of tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite is that you don’t see the advertising ‘promoted tweets’ from companies you don’t follow!

Activity for Day 8:
Think about the kinds of update you’ve seen on Twitter so far from the people you follow. Who do you most want to see tweets from? Create a list of your  colleagues on Twitter, or perhaps one for the people you do not want to follow directly, choose private or public.
You might want to explore TweetDeck or Hootsuite. Note, these tools are also helpful for managing information. More about this on Day 9.

I’m sure that, by now, you will have noticed that your Twitter feed contains a lot more than just text! While Twitter is primarily text based, a picture, as they say, paints a thousand words. Adding an image to text makes it much more effective, and moving images are even more eye-catching.

By tweeting pictures you can share the atmosphere at a conference, or a keynote speaker, or a poster that you think your followers will find interesting, or the results of a group activity in a seminar, or the cover of your latest book!

Adding media to your tweets is very straightforward but is slightly different depending on whether you are using a PC or an app on a mobile device. There are restrictions, of course – pictures must be in a certain format (i.e. GIF, JPG or PNG) and cannot be bigger than 5Mb, and videos can only be a maximum of 30 seconds long.

Mobile
The Twitter app is available for both iOS and Android devices and once you’ve installed it simply tap to create a tweet in the usual way.

You can choose to select a picture or video from your library, but you will need to give Twitter permission to access your pictures.

Alternatively you can choose to take a new picture or record a video from inside the app. To do this, simply tap on the blue camera icon. However, you need to give the app permission to access your camera and, if you want to record video, your microphone as well.

Once you have added your chosen media, add a comment in the ‘What’s happening’ box and tweet.

PC-Based
Accessing Twitter via a PC restricts you to selecting from your media library:

Simply click on the Media button, browse to your picture, and pick the one you want to share.

Third-party Applications
Many apps allow sharing to Twitter and other social media platforms. The image sharing app, Instagram, for example, offers the ability to share content to five external apps, including Twitter:

Video Autoplay
The default setting for video tweets on Twitter is to play them automatically as you scroll through your feed. If you want to change this, you can do so in Settings:

While you might not feel the need to disable video autoplay on a PC, you might have different ideas about mobile devices, where the default setting is to autoplay videos using either Wi-Fi or mobile data, whichever is available.

Video content can eat into your mobile data so, if your package only has a limited data allowance, you might want to switch to ‘Use Wi-Fi only’ or even disable autoplay videos completely.

Activity for Day 7:
So – tweet a picture. Take a picture of your desk, your colleagues, your building, anything you like, and share it with your followers. If you need inspiration then look at the pictures that the people you follow have tweeted. Just make sure you use the #HSLU10DoT hashtag so we can call see it. And, if you’re feeling adventurous, there’s always video…

Hashtags (using the hash symbol #) is where Twitter really gets interesting. Today is therefore a little more complex than usual, apologies! The hashtag is, like the @message, a feature that was developed by early users of Twitter, and was taken up and integrated into the platform as it was so useful.

Basically, the hashtag is a form of metadata. A # in front of a word signals that it is a keyword of some sort, tagging that tweet with a hash symbol (hence hash-tag). This means that you can easily search for all other tweets by other people containing that word similarly marked with a hashtag symbol. In fact, you don’t even need to search – if you click on any hashtagged term, it will search for you.

The hashtag for 10 Days of Twitter is, as you’ve guessed, #HSLU10DoT. You can therefore search for any tweets containing that hashtag, whether you follow the people using it or not. It’s how I found out who was participating in 10 Days of Twitter on Day 2 when you sent a tweet with the hashtag in, and any tweets you’ve sent since using it.

If you’re a Mac user and wondering where your hashtag key is, you need to press the alt key and the 3 key together to make the # symbol!

A hashtag needs to be a single word, preceded by a # symbol, with no spaces or other characters. It doesn’t need to be a real word – it can be an acronym of some sort, like #HSLU10DoT, and it needs to be understood, known or guessed by the people it’s relevant to. It could even be several words run into one (which counts as one word!) such as #ILoveTwitter (it can help to capitalise the individual words to make it easier to read). What it should be above anything else, though, is short, so that it doesn’t use up too many characters!

How do you know what hashtags to use, or to search for? You make them up! If you’re creating a new hashtag, it’s good to do a search first and check if it’s been used before, and if it has been used before, whether you are going to use it in a similar way for similar people. If so, you’re joining a larger, pre-existing conversation! If not, then you might be confusing things, with a hashtag meaning different things to different people. If you’re talking to a limited, known group, as I am here, or as you might at a conference, then the hashtag might be meaningless to outsiders (which is probably fine – people for whom it’s relevant will probably be aware of it already or easily figure it out). If you’re creating a hashtag hoping to start a larger discussion which is open to anyone, then it needs to be self-explanatory and something that someone might very likely search for or guess, like #highered.

You’ll see people using hashtags you might be interested in when scanning your Twitter feed, and if you click on the hashtag, you will find all the other tweets using that hashtag recently.

Hashtags really come in useful in academia in three ways.

An open, extended discussion
Someone might start a discussion about a topic on Twitter which is open to all to contribute, and it is drawn together using a common hashtag. You can also use it to gather responses. For example #oer is a useful way for learning developers to share resources, guidelines and thinking on Open Educational Resources, and give the public an insight on this topic. You might also be interested in other hashtags for education.

Livechat
A live chat is a conversation on Twitter which takes place in real time. A topic, time and a hashtag is agreed by the leaders, and they are joined on the day by people who want to talk about that topic with each other. Livechats can be fast and furious, but a great way to discuss, make new contacts and share experiences. Popular ones which you might be interested in are #LTHEchat, a weekly chat for  for educators in higher education to discuss learning and teaching and #EdchatDE, the german twitter chat for educators and others. Search for the hashtags to see what was discussed last time, and join in the next one!

Livetweeting
To livetweet an event means to tweet about it while you’re actually participating in it. Conferences or seminar presentations are often livetweeted. This may be done in an official capacity, with organisers inviting participants to livetweet the papers, giving attendees a pre-agreed ‘official’ hashtag to use, running up to the event, during and after, to find out who’s going to be there, what the papers were about, and any follow-up questions. A good example of this is the #eduhubdays16 conference early in 2016.

More on livetweeting (optional reading)
A live stream of the tweets at the conference may even be displayed alongside the speaker on a ‘tweetwall’, using a tool such as Hootfeed, such as this feed from the 2015 Learning and Teaching Conference, using the hashtag #LTAConf:

• If you’re at a conference, livetweeting it is a great way to connect to other attendees. It’s easier to approach someone when you’ve been ‘talking’ to each other already on Twitter, and if you’re at the conference on your own, you can find people to hang out with
• By livetweeting the presentations, you alert people who aren’t present that you are there, so they can find out more from you later if they couldn’t attend the conference, or were in a parallel session
• You can let your followers know who was presenting, and a brief insight into what the papers were about – if it sounds interesting, then your followers can look up publications by those people
• You can ask questions or for clarification from the presenter, from other conference attendees, or in fact anyone on Twitter, during the sessions. You can also enhance what the presenter is saying, with links to more information and comments on their presentation. Livetweeting is very visible, so do keep comments professional
• It’s a way to continue conversations, perhaps with the presenter themselves, after the conference has finished
• People following the livetweeting from elsewhere can still participate in the conference, addressing questions for the speakers via tweets. This is especially effective if the conference is also being livestreamed on the web, with live video and sound (used as backchannel)
• Presenters themselves might find the tweets useful feedback, to see how people have responded to their paper

However, livetweeting events must be approached sensitively and professionally. Some presenters may feel that the conference space is a closed group, and feel uncomfortable with their paper being conveyed outside the room to those who aren’t there. They may worry that their ideas and words are being misrepresented in 140 characters. It can also be quite distracting to see people typing away and surfing the internet when you’re presenting, even if it’s relevant! A good start to thinking about livetweeting is this article in the Guardian, which offers useful tips.

If you are livetweeting, then do:

• check with the organisers and presenters that it’s ok to livetweet
• alert your followers that you will be livetweeting so they’re not confused!
• make sure you tweet professionally – be polite and respectful! It will be very visible if you are being unpleasant about a colleague or peer
• ensure that you reflect the speaker’s words as accurately as you can, and make it very clear, as with livetweets, that you are conveying someone else’s words

Trending
When you hear the phrase ‘trending on Twitter’, it means that there are a lot of people talking about the same thing, using a common hashtag. Trending hashtags are also displayed on the left-hand side of your profile page: