This year, as part of my final year project; I will be involved in running the second years online journalism class @bcumedia with Paul Bradshaw. The first lesson involved getting students to sign up, and use Twitter. I would have thought, with facebook status updates and all that, students would quickly get their head around a ‘similar’ service, but that wasn’t really the case. Thinking back to last year when we started using it, I guess you can’t really blame them, we weren’t much better.
But how do you actually explain twitter to someone who’s never used it before? Well, Paul gave students 10 people to follow trying get everything going, which for the most part went pretty well. Unfortunately @chloebb got confused over @replies and actually following people. She was probably the busiest tweeter of the bunch but the tweets ended up like this:
Joanna Geary picked up on it and thought she was being spammed by a twitter bot and @paulbradshaw eventually ended up apologizing and everyone was happy again.
The best thing is probably just to throw yourself in there, not being afraid of what you might or might not say. Focus on understanding the basics will probably be the best way to go, start following a few people. Don’t start out by following 2000 people as long as your account is relatively new. If a new user who only has a few updates starts following 1000′s of people, it’s usually a spammer who just hope people will auto-follow back. Understand that twitter is a social network more than a publishing platform. It’s strength lies in instant discussion and the ability to dig into ongoing discussions in real time. It’s a stream of commentary and open discussion between people, imagine a busy conference where you just pick and choose who you want to listen to. Any time you log onto twitter, you get a snapshot of the world at that particular time.
Twitter is really great for learning by doing, and I think that’s the best way to go. You pick up on things that are going on and respond to them in your own way. But if you are stuck and don’t really feel comfortable just throwing yourself to the masses, try creating a twitter template. Basically picking 5 twitter users that you enjoy or you know are popular (they must be doing something right), analyse their tweets and see if you can find a pattern and replicate that with your own tweets.
A few templates worth highlighting from twitip.com:
@kevinrose wrote -> Lunch then movie at home, relaxing weekend. http://twitpic.com/zeeb
Template – What I’m doing -> picture
@tferriss wrote -> Experimenting w/ various ways to start a fire in a fireplace. How about a Coke can + bar of chocolate? http://tr.im/2nor Your tips + tricks?
Template – Ask question? Offer potential answer (or title) -> link -> question?
And a few I just made up to get you networking:
@styletime wrote -> RT @imjustcreative Logo Design Roundup Part 4 – Over 50 Ways Designers Promote & Brand Themselves http://ping.fm/c1HKg
Template – ReTweet -> User name -> Title -> Link
@peteashton wrote -> @stef I do this constantly. The trick, I find, is to think like a cleaner. Where would be the perfect place to plug in a hoover?
Template – User name -> Additional Info/Tip/Solution to a followers tweet
The main problem when people have signed up and gotten to grips with the whole thing, seems to be how they manage all the information that gets passed along. 90% of it will not be of immediate interest to you anyway, so the challenge is to filter or dig out the info that you are interested in. Twitter itself is basically one large stream of tweets that you can dig into at anytime by using the search tool. This lets you dig into 2million plus users and filter out the info you are interested in.
Twitter let’s you filter this stream by signing up and creating a base of followers. You will then only get updates from the people you follow, effectively this filters the large twitter stream and provide a constant stream of messages from people you follow. This can lead to quite a substantial amount of people and when you get to a certain number, you will want to filter these tweets as well. You want to know what people in your immediate community are talking about, or what they are saying about a certain event, person etc. Twitters web interface is not great at this and you can’t really use the search tool, because you will get every tweet in the universe (almost). You really need an application like TweetDeck or Twhirl, which will let you filter your own stream of messages published by your tweeps (is that a word?). These apps also lets you track your @replies and dm’s (direct messages) in separate columns so you don’t have to worry about missing any of those either.
I know this is pretty basic stuff, but as I experienced today, twitter is not second nature yet! Even though BBC keeps banging on about it.
Kasper Sorensen is an online multimedia journalist with everything that encompasses. Hook up with him on 
Hi Kaspar,
Great post!
One additional item I would add: once you have grasped Twitter, try to remember what a scary place it can be for people starting out.
I forgot that particular one and have learnt my lesson!
As for dealing with following many people, I think Tweetdeck (as you mentioned) and Tweet Grid (http://tweetgrid.com) are really useful tools. Both allow you to separate out the people you follow into groups (journalists, mates, local folk, etc).
That’s a good point actually. Though it does seem pretty straight forward at first, it’s probably not before you have really put some time into it, that you recognize how useful it can be.
I’ve been using TweetDeck for quite some time, but TweetGrid is pretty new to me. But I think it has one great advantage in that you can share your groups/grids.
This is a group I created of our online journalism class: http://is.gd/j2y6