hs2016

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: