Monday, June 29, 2009

The Skinny on Twitter part 2

As is true with so much these days, your Twitter experience will only be as good as the people you choose to follow.

Using the same logic, this is made much more likely if you have a clear purpose behind who you decide to follow. It doesn't really matter if your a fan of Wii bowling or American Girl Dolls, if you find your niche, the posts will draw you in. I like to follow educators playing with technology. I was lucky enough early on to come across this very popular (in my niche) link:

100 Top Educators to Follow On Twitter

which seemed so perfectly concise and organized yet pretty overwhelming at the same time!

I decided a good strategy would be to follow 10 at a time. For whatever reason, I could not get the list to print, so I jotted down the first 10 names on paper and painstakingly use the "find people" option on Twitter to look them all up and start following (I was not feeling particularly techno saavy, but I achieved my goal).

After about a week of reading posts, I had a pretty good grasp of who did not meet my needs and needed to go....excessive posts, way too much tech lingo, etc. and weeded them out. I was now ready to look at the next 10, but I was sure there must be an easier way.

Looking back at the list, I now noticed there were many links to personal web sites I noticed a small link after each name (for example: 1. Bernie Dodge @berniedodge). Imagine my excitement when clicking it brought me straight to his Twitter page! You can immediately see how many people are following a person and read their last 20 posts. It gives you a great snapshot of how often they post and what they talk about. If it peaks your interest, simply click to follow.

So, at this point, I am still using the list to build up my following. I have also noticed that those little @name links show up alot in posts. If someone I enjoy following links to a certain name often, I figure they must be pretty cool to and I follow them by association. I really am beginning to feel like such a follower :)

One last note, I have noticed that during certain conferences, lots of ed tech people get REALLY exicted and use Twitter more like a CB radio. No worries, they calm down eventually.

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