Welcome to our 5th and final day!

As it’s Friday, let’s start the day by trying the #FollowFriday convention. Did you follow anyone on Tuesday whose tweets turned out to be really useful, who you think we should be following? Let us know! A typical Follow Friday tweet might look like this:

Follow awesome librarians! #FollowFriday @ned_potter @jsecker @InfoPro_Tasha @libgoddess @jennydelasalle @LibnOfCongress

Managing people
Over the last Five 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 Two. Some examples might be

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

Twitter lists

Twitter has a feature that 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 One, so you could find each other on Day Two. 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 that 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 profile picture at the top right of the page. Select ‘Lists’, and you will see a page which will contain any lists you will make. Click on ‘Create new 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 menu (three dots), you will see options that include ‘add or remove from lists’. While we’re on the topic of managing people, you can also block or report people using this menu, for example, if you are followed by a spam account or someone you don’t want following you.

When you select Lists from your profile picture, you’ll see the lists that you have created, lists that you’ve subscribed to and the lists that you are part of. Click on the lists to see just the tweets from accounts on that list.

To follow someone else’s list, look for Lists in the options along the top of their profile page. (If it’s not there, they don’t have any lists.) Click on the one you’re interested in and then choose Subscribe.

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. There are some third party applications created by other companies as add-ons to Twitter, to help you out with some of the things about Twitter which you may find a bit overwhelming. Some of them will need to be integrated with your Twitter account to drawn information from them, and to do this, you will need to grant them access to your account (you can undo this again from your Twitter account settings).

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). You can use Tweetdeck to tweet from several different Twitter accounts 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.

To use TweetDeck, you will need to log in using your Twitter account. 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!).

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. Hootsuite is a subscribed service, but there is a free plan that lets you connect up to three networks.

You can sign up to Hootsuite 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 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.

Task

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? You might want to try making a list of your colleagues on Twitter, or perhaps one for the professional and funding bodies you follow.

Well, that’s the last of our Five Days of Twitter, but don’t worry if you’re still catching up – so are others, and the conversation will be continuing on #SU5DoT for quite some time, I hope! You might like to keep an eye on the programme hashtag and support academic 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!).