Twittering

[inappropriatelyemployed]

I am up and running on twitter - tips welcome to widen circulation!

I have cotton-wool for brains at the moment (pre-Tribunal nerves!) Can you post your twitter name again?

@sencollusion

Thanks. Here?s some generic tips for you.

Get rid of the ?egg? as your profile picture. Many spammers join Twitter for very short space of time and therefore keep the egg. For this reason, some twitters won?t connect (me included) if you don?t have a real profile picture (it doesn?t have to be a picture of you ? mine is a picture of an animal). Putting a real picture on your profile shows you are a real living and breathing person.

On your ?about me? text, put a hyperlink to your blog. Your twitter account will then drive clicks to your blog.

Everytime you tweet a link to your blog, include any relevant hashtags. In fact, anytime you tweet always include at least one hashtag. Most experts say don?t do more than 3 hashtags in anyone tweet. Some that I use include ? #homeed #dyslexia #dyslexic. I?ve just had a quick play on Twitter and it looks as though people are using the hashtags #aspergers #austism, #asd.

Don?t tweet only about your specialist interest, tweet about other things too. People will get to know you as a real(ish!) person and are more likely to empathise with you & your tweets if you show more of yourself than just the professional.

You are a faberooni superstar and I owe you a pint!!

I have changed a few things.

How do you get in touch with people on there? Or get them to follow you?

Start following individual people. Some will automatically follow you back. I always follow people back if I am roughly interested in what they have put in their bio . Most people will have a similar policy. If someone follows you - it's sort of etiquette to always follow them back (if they interest you ). If you don't follow back, they will probably stop following you.

If I was you, I would search out SEN accounts and start following them (not just ASD/Austism people - I am very interested in what you have to say but because of family history am interested in dyslexia - so broaden your search to cover other SENs too)

I do twitter in peaks and troughs. At the moment I don't have too much time to tweet ( scared in case I tweet something rude about my LA too busy home eding!) so I've stayed at the 400+ mark for a good few months. But when I put my mind to it, by following people who interest me, I can get good quality followers back.

If you want to tweet someone, just put their name (with the @) in the tweet - normally at the start of the tweet. So if I wanted to tweet you, i'd type '@SENCollusion blah blah blah blah'

Oh forgot, to say...

The other thing I do is only follow about 20 to 30 people more than who are following me. eg if my followers are at 400, then I won't follow more than 420 to 430 people. Some tweeters have massive gaps, ie followers = 20, but following = 100s and 100s - to my mind they look desperate!

Thanks! I owe you another pint!

Got a message asking for validation through Truetwit. What's that?

Ooo that's a new one to me. >

Ah, here we are - TrueTwit is a third party application which is supposed to help users weed out spammers and only accept real people as followers. So the person you are trying to follow is using this app to make you validate yourself when you follow them. Up to you if you carry on by clicking the link and validate yourself! Tbh, I've never come across anyone using this and I probably won't follow the person cos I'm very lazy and can't be bothered too busy to validate myself.

Thanks a lot!

Web links too. I am putting whole links in but DH says I should shrink them but doesn't know how!

I put whole links in mine and let Twitter shorten them. Tbh as long as you get your message across in one message, I wouldn't worry about shortening the links. If you do, it means you have to use a 3rd party app such as StumbleUpon, Tweetdeck (or even FaceBook or LinkedIn) - life is too short to worry about shortening links!

Personally I don't like clicking shortened links because you have no idea what website you'll land on - whereas you've got a rough idea with a full link (well, that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it ]

Twitter still makes the tco. links, though, iirc. There's supposed to be firefox add ons that re-lengthen them, but I've never got any to work.