Using Twitter

1. Using Twitter

2. Be mature about it • Pick a user name • Don’t be silly • Consider using your real name • Don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t say to your mother or your boss • Use a real picture of yourself, and not one of you with a keg in it. You can be casual but don’t be “Joe College Student” on Twitter

3. Use a real location • Don’t be cute • Write a real bio • Tell people you are a college student • Specify the university. Not MSU – that can mean Montana State University, Minnesota State University, etc. Say Michigan State University • Tell your major • You can talk about yourself, but stay away from religion and politics

4. Uses for Twitter • Share links to items of interest to your network • Re-distribute content from blog, web site • Get Feedback • Read News • Event Updates • Provide Live coverage • Crowd-source questions and answers • Promote specific content

5. Don’ts • Do not link to your Facebook profile unless there is NOTHING on it you wouldn’t show to your boss, grandparents or instructors • Don’t protect your updates. If you want to be private, stay off Twitter

6. Follow and be followed • Look for professionals in your field • Look for professors in your field; they are likely to tweet things relevant to college students • Look at who the good twitter users follow. Then follow the good ones. • Add a few media outlets

7. The basics • Update: Your tweet to the your Twitter universe • Reply: To reply to something someone tweets, click the curvy “reply” arrow. It will start your tweet with the @ symbol and that person’s user name • Retweet: Copy someone else’s tweet (or hit the retweet button) and add RT to the front with an @before their name. • Direct Message: Private messages between you and someone else who is following you

8. Using Lists • Organize the people you follow • The “groups” feature for Twitter • Creating a list • Click on new list link • Name the list: The name is also used for your list’s URL, which will be “twitter.com/username/list-name.” • Make it public or private • Public mans anyone can see it, anyone can follow • Private: Only you can see the list. Not even those on the list can see it • Add a description to the list

9. Each list is currently limited to 500 people • Users may create a maximum of 20 lists • Add users to your lists by going to their profile page, or from a following page • Manage your lists in the right-hand navigation of Twitter

10. The # (Hash tag) • Keep track of multi-party conversations or posts from an event • You can search for all posts from that event or conversation using that #, like #

11. Twitter tools • Tweetdeck • Good way to organize your tweets and send them • Allows you to send to Facebook at the same time • Can have more than one twitter account • Tweetmeme • Hottest links on Twitter at www.tweetmeme.com • Bingtweets: Trending topics on Twitter

12. Twitter sites for journalists • Muck Rack: Follow journalists on Twitter • 15 Social Media Twitter lists from Mashable • 10 journalists you should follow on Twitter

13. More Twitter resources • Top 7 mistakes new Twitter users make • Trendistic: Graphing trends in twitter • Twitter search • 15 Twitter directories compared on Mashable.com

14. Remember: • Tweets, like blog posts and comments, are indexed on search engines. So, don’t send any Twitter messages that you wouldn’t want your mother, your employer, or your who-knows-who to read either now or in the future. Once online, always online.