AKA Riptide Furse

I gave my first intro to Twitter to my colleagues the other day together with Heather Hurley. I missed some very good advice that I might not have missed if I had a check list. So in a post for “don’t do as I do” here are some tips for new people to Twitter.

• Fill in your bio section. If you are an educator make that clear. Many of us, me included, won’t follow someone if they don’t have something to contribute to my personal learning network (PLN). *Please note that I follow some people outside of education because my PLN expands outside of education.
• Change your settings to see all replies. This is important because if you tweet a question and someone that you don’t follow answers your question, you won’t see it. You want to see all replies in case you don’t follow someone that may reply to your tweets. If you get a tweet from someone that is helpful it is good karma to follow that person in return.
• Follow others! Choose a person in your network and look at who they are following. You can build your network by following those that can be the most use to you. DON’T FOLLOW EVERYONE UNLESS YOU WANT TO AND KNOW WHY YOU ARE DOING IT! Some people follow others to increase heir numbers for marketability. When people reach into the thousands of people they follow very little info is used. they are just working on their numbers. Twitter is about learning and gaining useful info not about noise.
• If Twitter is blocked, consider using one of the Instant Messaging systems to get tweets and also tweet from. Twitter supports the major IM services and also offers extra features using IM. One such things is tracking keywords using IM. You can keep an out for people tha use certain keywords in their tweets. I have added many people to my PLN by tracking the keyword “smartboard” through IM. Unfortunately this doesn’t work for the web site or through applications like twitterrific or Twhirl. AIM yes and Google Talk yes.
• Your icon is your association. People do become familiar with your icon. Make sure you make it representative of yourself. I change my icon quite frequently. That’s me and it says something about me. Others choose a representative picture and stay with that as how they want people to view them. Any way you look at it CHANGE YOUR ICON from the default brown square with circles.

So those are the tips. I’m sure others might want to add to this and I welcome their advice either in the comments or via twitter. In addition, I have uploaded some tiles or backgrounds that you can use for your twitter web page background. Take a look and tell me what you think.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/krossbow/sets/72157604288361250/