Lynne Y. Williams and Jackie Krause

What is Twitter? An introduction

Of all the chapters in this book, this is the only chapter that concentrates on a single social networking application. Twitter has antecedents and similarities to blogging (as discussed in Chapter 1) and Facebook-style social networking. However, in practice, it’s a different beast. It can be easy to mistake Twitter as a vehicle for stimulating two-way conversation within Twitter itself, and while a certain amount of that type of traffic does occur, for the most part, Twitter gets used as a one-way vehicle for disseminating news and information. What follows are some Twitter ‘how-tos’, and suggestions for the academic leverage of Twitter’s unique blend of immediacy and interconnectivity.

While blogging (see Chapter 1) is understood to belong to the old text-based concepts supporting Web 1.0, social networking sites (SNSs) sit firmly in the Web 2.0 category and make the creation of media-rich user generated content much easier than most of the old blogging platforms. More than that, SNSs also provide the essential interconnectivity that allows content creators to easily share their content with others. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) note these two qualities, stating that SNSs ‘allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content’ (p. 11). Although including the ability to generate content as well as self-publish and share content provides almost unlimited opportunities for those users with something to say, there’s an unspoken downside to the process. Every day, dozens of blogs and SNS pages are created … and promptly abandoned. Technorati, a dedicated blog search engine, estimates that there are more than 200 million blogs, not to mention SNS pages, a statistic that continues to climb. By the way, that statistic is only for English-language blogs; with Chinese-language content also included, the figure is much higher. At the same time, Technorati goes on to speculate that almost 95 per cent of these blogs and pages are abandoned almost immediately, but why? Brown (2011) presents five of the most common reasons behind blog abandonment. First, the majority of first-time bloggers seriously underestimate the time commitment necessary to maintaining a compelling blog that others will want to read. The best blogs are constantly being updated with fresh content, so if an author can’t devote several hours a week to the upkeep of their blog, they’ll probably eventually abandon it due to a lack of time.

Another reason that people walk away from their blogs is that they haven’t got a clear purpose or direction for their blog. The concept of presenting their ideas sounded quite attractive until they sat down with that ‘blank piece of paper’ staring at them from the monitor. Some people are better at writing than designing a good user experience with a blog. Many potential bloggers fail to succeed because they have design or development issues with their blogging platform and don’t know where to find help. Closely related to the lack of a focused direction for a blog is the lack of inspiration that can set in after a blogger has effectively exhausted what they had to say about a given area of interest. Sometimes, the purpose of a blog can be too narrowly defined, thus limiting the amount of content that can be presented. Lack of inspiration can also be aggravated by a lack of visitor interaction. If a blog has gone stale, or is just starting out, getting and keeping visitors can be tough, and without that type of interactivity many bloggers lose interest and leave the blog to its fate.

It’s probable that most ordinary users simply aren’t cut out to be dedicated bloggers. In recognition of this, a more accessible type of blogging, called microblogging, has sprung up. In 2005, Kottke described the uses of microblogging, using the term ‘tumblelogs’ for the activity. Kottke (2005, para. 2) defines tumblelogs as ‘a quick and dirty stream of consciousness’, with posts consisting of only a brief sentence or two. While the term tumblelogs isn’t used much any more, the microblogging concept itself has caught on and grown exponentially. People who may not have enough interesting material to compose a full multi-paragraphed post can easily come up with a sentence that conveys some thought or action they feel is worth publishing and sharing. And that’s where Twitter comes in.

Nations (2011, para. 5) defines Twitter as ‘a cross between blogging and instant messaging’, while admitting that the definition doesn’t cover all of Twitter’s potential. Using Twitter, an individual can quickly make short observations whenever they have seen something or thought of something. More than that, these micro-posts can then be instantly shared with a tweeter’s followers. A tweeter can have followers who read their tweets, and, in turn, they may also be following other tweeters in whom they’re interested. These ‘following’ activities engender an enormous amount of interconnectivity and can give any given tweeter a steady stream of updated material and information. Examples of ways in which to leverage all this interconnectivity would include music festivals or conferences using Twitter to update participants on upcoming acts or presentations. Politicians use Twitter to keep their constituent followers updated on pending legislation and speaking dates. News media use Twitter to send breaking news stories to subscriber followers, and so on. In all of these examples, the common theme is the ability of Twitter to quickly push information to large groups of people. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad definition of what we, as academics, do when we lecture in a classroom!

How can Twitter be used by academics?

Like any other social networking tool, Twitter should be used carefully and appropriately if you plan on including it as a part of your academic work. Mollett et al. (2011) have several recommendations to take into consideration. They advise academics to always keep in mind that social networking will place you in the public eye and that there will be people following you that you may not necessarily be aware of, such as supervisors, students and grant awarding committees. Post nothing on Twitter that you might be ashamed of later; think of the old rule concerning ‘angry’ emails: count to ten before you hit ‘send’. For instance, it’s probably not a good idea to tweet after a long, aggravating day when you feel like venting. Those late night thoughts might reach the eyes of various university stakeholders who will be decidedly not amused. Try to avoid taking stances on touchy subjects on Twitter; leave religion and politics to your paper diary or your personal (rather than academic) Twitter account.

While it’s possible to maintain separate personas between a Twitter account used for academic purposes and a personal Twitter account, be aware that no matter what you do with your privacy settings, there will inevitably be a certain amount of blurring between the two. The interconnectivity of all social networking sites makes it almost impossible to maintain completely separate personalities online. You needn’t allow that knowledge to stifle your enjoyment of your personal account as long as you realize that you’ll probably have students or colleagues who come across your personal account and will want to follow you. You’ll need to decide whether it’s preferable to allow a bit of blur with selected individuals or whether you should keep followers distinctly separated between accounts. If you do happen to tweet inappropriately and have ‘tweeter’s regret’, hover your mouse over the offending tweet to view the pop-up menu and delete it.

How to get started

Hashtags are used to give your followers an easy way of categorizing your tweets. Tech for Luddites (2009, para. 5) describes a hashtag as ‘simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic’. Using hashtags provides your followers with a way to sort your tweets according to subject or category. Anyone can create their own hashtags by including one in a tweet using this format: #hashtag (replace hashtag with your own subject word). It’s good ‘tweetiquette’ to do a Twitter search before inventing your own hashtags, in case someone else has already begun categorizing tweets with the same hashtags. Once you’ve either invented your own hashtags or selected pre-existing hashtags you include your chosen hashtag at the beginning of your tweet to neatly categorize the content of that tweet. Hashtags will take up a bit of your 140 character tweet limit, so you’ll want to keep them as short as possible.

When your followers wish to see all of the Twitter content associated with a given hashtag, they’ll enter the hashtag in the Twitter search which will then collect all tweets in that category. One of the benefits of using hashtags to categorize research tweets is that often a hashtag will collect tweets from other, related research. You can also combine hashtags to narrow your search. To see how hashtags work, try this quick example exercise:

Take care to ‘keep it short’ in your tweets; remember that you’ve only got 140 characters (not words) to get your point across. Most seasoned tweeters use an URL shortening service, such as Bit.ly (https://bitly.com/) or TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com/) for sharing URLs without taking up too much character count.

The @username syntax is used when you wish to mention a particular tweeter. For example, you might want to tweet this:

Since you’ve ‘mentioned’ @Mias_Kitchen in your tweet, the owner of that username will receive a copy of your tweet in his or her mentions and will know that you’ve passed their recipe along to others. If you’d like to reply directly to a certain tweeter, you place their Twitter username at the very start of your tweet, like so:

Keep in mind that Twitter will always assume that you’re replying when you place a username at the beginning of a tweet. If you simply wish to mention that person in a tweet, be sure to place their username somewhere besides the beginning of the tweet. You can also use the @username syntax to reply directly to more than one person:

It’s considered poor tweetiquette to reply to all of your followers if you actually intended to only reply to a single individual, so don’t be lazy, always put the @username of the individual to whom you’re replying at the start of the tweet.

Let’s say that you’ve run across someone else’s tweet that you’d like to pass along to your followers. To do this, you’ll need to ‘retweet’ (RT) the first tweet, like so:

In this example, @audreywatters has found a good tweet from an Ed-Tech source that concerns The Digital Library and wants to pass it along to her followers. Note that @audreywatters did not originate the tweet, her Ed-Tech source did, hence why she’s retweeting. One thing that’s considered to be extremely poor tweetiquette is to use an RT to reply to someone’s tweet; it’s a bit like re-gifting that awful Christmas sweater that your Auntie Mable knitted for you last year!

There you have most of the basics for getting started with Twitter, for more information, suggestions and tips, the Twitter Guide Book is a great resource: http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/.

Research

Academic researchers face an almost constant scrutiny to prove the worth of their research to the public (Dunning, 2011). With greater competition for funding, researchers need to find ways to promote their research in a positive light. Academic researchers have turned to blogs and Twitter to share their research and self-promote their work. Through blogs and Twitter, researchers can make their work available to the public.

Sharing your research, taking advantage of crowdsourcing, finding research collaborators, or finding relevant research in your particular field is made easier through Twitter. Twitter can be used advantageously during a research project for keeping the various members of the research team informed and updated on the project’s status. Mollett et al. (2011) recommend keeping a research blog (as noted in Chapter 1 of this book) that documents the full body of your research, then sending tweets that link to that blog. You can then request feedback and comments from your followers, thus gaining useful insights. To get the best use out of Twitter, you should maintain complete summaries of all of your research work where followers can get to them. Consider including full summaries in your research blog or perhaps in the research repository maintained by your university or college. Whenever something occurs that might impact your research, such as governmental policy or related journal articles, be sure to tweet about it as soon as you see it.

Saunna Davis, an English professor, demonstrates the idea of finding relevant work through Twitter:

Consider creating a research ‘web’ with Twitter that presents your own research tweets alongside related research from other sources. Mollett et al. (2011), p. 7 comment that while this may appear to be a ‘case of helping the competition’, it’s also a good way to draw attention to the entire research area, thus attracting attention and funding to that area. A research network can also stimulate debate which, in turn, improves the research standards for all of the entities engaged in the Twitter web. As academics, we seek to find like-minded individuals with whom we can communicate, exchange ideas, collaborate, and make new connections. Twitter can facilitate these connections on a causal level regardless of geography.

Ingram (2011) discusses a Twitter use that could greatly benefit a research project, in the form of ‘crowdsourcing’. Ingram’s (2011) example of research-related crowdsourcing involves researchers at Johns Hopkins University who were interested in uncovering public health trends by collecting Twitter search data. The two researchers at Johns Hopkins used ‘a software algorithm to filter out approximately 1.5 million messages that referred to health-related issues, by focusing on a variety of terms related to medical issues and illnesses’ (ibid., para. 2). One of the researchers makes this comment about their findings:

While crowdsourcing does have certain privacy issues associated with the practice, if the usual protocols are observed it has the potential to give a researcher access to enormous data sets that occur practically in real time, making it possible to observe human behaviour in a manner unthinkable just a few short years ago.

In addition to crowdsourcing, researchers use Twitter to post links to their papers or research blogs and to encourage conversation. Researchers are also posting links to podcasts, conference presentations and publications. Savvy academic writers are including #hashtags to create interest around their research and to report new developments (Mollett et al., 2011). Mark Bately (2010) (@markbately) has additional suggestions for generating research interest through Twitter. He suggests that researchers create provocative, short posts that include web links intended to grab attention and encourage interest. When seeking survey participants, Bately recommends using Twitter to send interesting and catchy notices with a link to the survey. Be sure to follow other tweeting researchers to see what they are doing and stay active to build your base of followers.

Crowdsourcing isn’t the only way to gather large data sets using Twitter. There are hundreds of ‘helper’ applications that can help a researcher pull in data in various ways. For example, Twitscoop provides the user with a running visual display of trends, called a ‘tag-cloud snapshot’. Tags that are currently being tweeted appear in the display in a size relative to the amount of current usage. The larger the tag, the more activity (or ‘buzz’) that tag is generating. Clicking on a tag in the display pops up the actual tweets that are using the tags. If your research is informed by watching various trends, Twitscoop provides a quick look at what trends people are talking about in real time.

Guus van den Brekel, an information specialist for the medical library at Groningen University in the Netherlands, recommends the use of another ‘helper’ application, TweetDeck, to effectively categorize and explore Twitter data (Bauer, 2010). Brekel notes that the default Twitter interface isn’t particularly useful for pulling data sets out of groups of tweets, but with a management tool such as TweetDeck, tweets can easily be placed into sets for examining trends, or analysing groups of tweeters.

Twitter also provides a relatively painless method for documenting the monthly activities within a research project. Noting the growth in your followers for the project can be a good way to provide support to funding proposals, and the effect can be further strengthened if you link your tweets with a research blog that also invites comments.

Bately (2010) warns that not all research is appropriate for Twitter. In some cases, the Twitter population may not be the perfect population for certain research studies. However, using Twitter can open up new opportunities to gain respondents that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Teaching

Mollett et al. (2011) suggest using a separate Twitter account for each course in which you plan to use Twitter. This limits the audience to just the students in the class and makes it easier to keep track of the conversations over the course of the term. For each course’s Twitter account, design the username such that it reflects the course name; for example, @IT530ComputersandNetworks. Urge all students in the course to become followers; if you have students who are unable or unwilling to set up their own Twitter account, you can provide a substitute in the form of an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed that presents the tweets in a list that appears either in your teaching blog or within a learning management system (LMS) such as Moodle or Blackboard. If you aren’t an experienced HTML developer or haven’t tinkered with RSS feeds before, try using a ‘Twitter to RSS’ application such as http://twitter2rss.com/ to handle the coding for you. SoftwareGarden.com provides a good tutorial on RSS feeds for the less technically inclined (What is RSS?, 2004).

Once you have the course’s Twitter account set up and running, it can be used to supply students with up-to-the-minute information concerning all course activities. Frequent tweeting during the week can be used as a powerful form of student support; use tweets to congratulate students who have done particularly well on a given assignment, or use Twitter to answer questions that may have been brought up in class. A carefully selected stream of tweets will emphasize your engagement with them and with the course. This type of tweeting support can be especially useful for those academics who supervise graduate students. Graduate school can give students a feeling of isolation or of being disconnected from their committee members; even weekly tweeting can provide a better sense of involvement for them.

Dunlap and Lowenthal (2009) recommend the use of Twitter for online teaching in particular because it can greatly enhance the instructor’s presence as perceived by the students. The researchers argue that social interaction between the instructor and students, as well as between students, will elevate the level of engagement in the online course. In most LMSs, such as Moodle or Blackboard, there are already a number of tools available to provide a certain level of interaction, such as asynchronous discussion threads and chat rooms. Twitter differs from these tools in that it allows participants to comment and interact almost in real time, which is quite similar to a live conversation. Dunlap and Lowenthal give a number of compelling examples, such as this one:

From this example, it’s easy to understand the exciting immediacy of Twitter in providing content-rich exchanges so quickly. Twitter also provides real-time response to addressing student issues that inevitably crop up. Obviously Twitter is useful for answering student questions that concern assignments that have a deadline, but the immediacy element of Twitter can also allow an instructor to quickly step in and address problems such as conflict between students, especially if the course includes team projects.

In order to derive genuine benefit from Twitter as used in a classroom, whether online or physical, the students must perceive the use of Twitter as relevant to the course and to learning in general. The instructor must provide a clear and focused purpose to his or her tweets, so that the benefits of tweeting are immediately apparent to the students. Under most circumstances, the instructor can’t realistically require all students in the course to participate in Twitter. However, if the instructor strongly encourages his or her students to at least give Twitter a try, and then backs up that encouragement with interesting, relevant tweets, the students are more likely to genuinely engage with the medium and garner the benefits.

Professional branding

Labrecque et al. (2010) discuss the implications of having an online identity, noting that a great deal of information about a given person is effectively out of their hands since the information may be provided by a variety of other sources, some of which the individual may not know about. The researchers suggest that individuals should take at least partial control of the type of image that they present online by deliberately crafting their own personal brand.

Just being aware that you have a personal brand online is an important first step towards managing your brand. Labrecque et al. (ibid.) suggest conducting your own audit of your online persona by doing some Google searches using a variety of search terms for your name; if you’re a married female, you may also want to search using your maiden name to cover all your bases. If you already have a social media account, you may want to sift through comments that are related to your own posts or shared material. You’ll also want to consider how your profile is constructed; Labrecque et al. (ibid.) discovered that viewers of your profile material tend to be negatively impressed if your material appears to be unauthentic. For instance, ‘there was a disdain for people who put up many obviously posed pictures’ (ibid., p. 45), particularly if the photos had been ‘photoshopped’ to present a more flattering appearance. Other elements that can affect the perception of your profile are the number of friends or followers that you have. A non-celebrity who has thousands of followers will typically be perceived as someone who is deliberately out to impress the viewer, a trait that will be judged as unauthentic. If you have fewer than approximately 15 followers, viewers will assume that you’re aloof or socially disadvantaged. The amount of personal information that you disclose about yourself may also be misperceived; for a professional brand, you may want to consider removing things such as your marital status, religious preference and even your gender.

After taking a careful audit of your online profile, you’re then ready to begin crafting your own professional brand. Nanton and Dicks (2011) recommend treating your professional brand as a storytelling exercise, using Twitter as your primary storytelling tool which allows you to keep your followers up to date: ‘Twitter is a great place to engage with your audience and keep them up to date on all of your latest adventures’ (ibid., para. 2).

The crucial activity from this point is keeping your followers constantly updated on what you’re doing in the professional sense. Nanton and Dicks (ibid.) note that your tweets don’t have to be exciting each time you tweet, but you should tweet enough to make your followers feel that they’re ‘in the loop’.

Although you want to be cautious about revealing too much personal information in connection with your professional brand, Nanton and Dicks (ibid.) suggest leavening your work and research-related tweets with the occasional personal tweet. This gives a note of authenticity to your persona and gives your followers the sense that they know you. While you don’t have to share a dinner date you’ve gone on, you might consider tweeting about something relatively harmless, such as a lunch shared with colleagues, mentioning a little about the food and conversation.

Last, but not least, Nanton and Dicks (ibid.) urge you to truly interact with your followers. Many brand-conscious tweeters ‘treat Twitter like a bulletin board – they log on a couple of times each week, post something, and then leave’ (ibid., para. 5). This type of behaviour makes it difficult for your followers to really engage with you and they’ll eventually lose interest. Since Twitter is essentially a mobile platform, if you have an Internet-enabled handset, such as a BlackBerry, try tweeting on the go to give a sense of immediacy to your tweets.

The most important element of professional branding is to accept the fact that, whether you like it or not, if you spend any time at all online, and particularly if you’ve already been using social media in your personal life, you have a professional brand. It’s up to you to take control of your own brand and shape it into the image that you wish to present to your colleagues and your students.

‘In the field’: academics using Twitter

As we consider ways of communicating with students and peers, we can be encouraged that social media is ‘catching on’ somewhat with academics. There’s plenty of evidence of Twitter usage by a number of faculty and researchers at a variety of schools and universities, all the way from community colleges, traditional on-ground university settings and for-profit online schools. When looking for ways to communicate to a wider audience, the use of both blogging and microblogging provide a means of making an instant connection with those followers.

When considering what to tweet, avid blogger and tweeter, Deevy Bishop, suggests that you simply ‘tweet to others things you think will interest them’ (Bishop, 2011, para. 22). Additionally, Bishop warns new tweeters not to tweet every mundane aspect of your life. What makes for a good tweet is something useful, insightful, informative, or provocative. Twitter is often used to start a conversation around a topic. By posting interesting information and including URL links, you can share with a greater community and encourage conversation. Those academic tweeters that tweet for students suggest that Twitter makes it easier to connect with a large class of students in a more personal way. Some professors will use Twitter during lectures to encourage student participation. One University of Texas history professor posts questions during lectures and asks students to tweet responses. The results indicated that students who might not otherwise participate in class conversations used Twitter to share their thoughts (Miners, 2010). Other academic tweeters suggest that Twitter allows them to maintain a connection and encourage a conversation outside of the classroom. Some professors will tweet class assignment tips, suggestions or resources and encourage the class to share their own resources through Twitter.

Doug Belshaw (@dajbelshaw), a research analyst and educator, suggests that Twitter can be used in the classroom to ‘encourage students to become their own learning network’ (Belshaw, 2007, para. 9). Belshaw draws upon the theory of connectivism which suggests that a network of connections can serve to form bridges to a greater knowledge potential (Siemens, 2004). In a learning network formed through digital connections, students can take advantage of the flow of information thereby creating and contributing to new knowledge. Belshaw further suggests that in addition to networked learning, Twitter can support personal learning networks by providing a space where students can communicate with those they know online. Some additional considerations for using Twitter in the classroom include tweeting ideas after the class ends, seeking feedback from students while the class is under way, in effect creating a backchannel, creating asynchronous class conversations, and promoting a sense of community (Gordon, 2009). Gordon also advises faculty to consider using Twitter to brainstorm on topics, take polls, share interesting websites, make announcements, or encourage games such as a Twitter search. Twitter can encourage student engagement at a different level than direct class participation and can, in effect, become a new form of class participation rooted in the digital domain. Bruce Johnson (@DrBruceJ) (2011) encourages students to follow his Twitter feed as a means of developing a connection and a learning network. Johnson comments that, by following student tweets, you can ‘develop a sense of who they are based upon what they’ve written’ (ibid., para. 7).

Using Twitter to encourage professional engagement, connection and collaboration

As academics, we seek to find like-minded individuals with whom we can communicate, exchange ideas, collaborate, and make new connections. Twitter can facilitate these connections on a causal level regardless of geography. Debby Kurti (@DebbyK) is a community college professor, educational technology activist and publisher of the Educational Experimentalist Daily. She uses Twitter to connect with a large group of peers for discussion and collaboration. For professional networking, Debby has the following recommendations: ‘I have collaborated with others on projects and presentations, shared new ideas and technology, and communicated about teaching challenges and successes. The key is to build up a useful network and then participate. It’s not a spectator sport’ (D. Kurti, personal communication, 5 December 2011).

Nancy White (@nancywhite) provides a number of examples of collaboration through the use of Twitter in a wiki post (White, n.d.). One such example is the use of Twitter to facilitate professional development. A ‘flashmeeting’ was tweeted by one of the individuals she was following. She was able to quickly attend the meeting and received word of a new learning tool that she might not have known about otherwise. White provides other examples including using Twitter while attending professional development activities to participate in the backchannel conversations and using Twitter as a virtual water cooler. Here Twitter can be used to connect individuals in disperse locations and to facilitate instant collaborations among individuals.

As universities seek to develop more collaborations with other universities, Twitter can bring individuals together in a way that can help identify and facilitate those partnerships (Anyangwe, 2011). For university researchers seeking feedback from fellow academics, using Twitter in conjunction with an academic blog has been shown to garner quick feedback. Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor) writes of his experience in an experiment of open research and collaboration (Matthews, 2011). Matthews decided to incorporate academic blogging in an application for research funding. In his application proposal, he detailed how he would use academic blogging to actively promote his research and engage with policy makers. Admittedly, Matthews was unaware of his audience of blog readers. In an experiment to see just who was reading, he posted his draft proposal in his blog and followed it with a tweet advising interested parties to review his proposal and comment. He was surprised to see how quickly word spread. In addition, there were numerous comments made to the post that were beneficial. He was able to incorporate many recommendations into a revised draft of his proposal as well as rethink some of the approach based on critical feedback from those who participated. This collaboration illustrates how both blogging and Twitter can support crowdsourcing activities in an academic endeavour.

Debby Kurti notes that she has used Twitter to crowdsource updates for a course outline. She had a remarkable number of faculty from all over the country provide suggestions. This same method could be used to find research collaborators through tweeting brief glimpses of the research question and asking the community of Twitter to provide a conversation.

Is tweeting for you?

Zhao (2009) notes that Twitter is typically used in quite a different way to other social networking tools, referring to it as a ‘people-based RSS feed[s]’ (ibid., p. 245). The brevity and related informality of the microblogging platform make it ideal for making quick, frequent comments on an individual’s everyday activities, a bit like swapping stories around the water cooler. The ‘real-time’ nature of Twitter gives people an impression of understanding what’s on the tweeter’s mind at the moment. While tweets are necessarily too short to initiate any kind of deep interchange on their own, they can easily act as a springboard to more complex communications. One of Zhao’s subjects describes the dynamic in this way: ‘By reading someone’s updates, you get more present understanding of what’s on that person’s mind, what he or she has been interested [sic], so that it’s more [sic] easily to get a conversation started and flow’ (ibid., p. 246).

Tweeters note that the voluntary nature of Twitter means that they are less concerned about the general nature of their tweets, unlike phone calls, IM (instant messaging) or email. The recipients of their tweets are people who have deliberately chosen to follow their tweets, so there isn’t a question of invading another person’s time and space. Twitter interchanges don’t imply that there’s any sort of reply required, which frees the reader to quickly read through a section of tweets and filter them out according to interest, rather than priority.

One of the major challenges of Twitter is the almost completely disorganized nature of incoming tweets, at least within the original Twitter interface. Following a prolific tweeter or following a large group of tweeters can easily result in cognitive overload and can be counterproductive to the original intention of learning more about whomever or whatever you may be following. If you find yourself getting overwhelmed by avalanches of tweets there are plenty of tools available to help sort the gold from the dross. For example, TweetDeck allows you to sort people into groups which simplifies sorting out work-related tweets from personal tweets. Filttr (https://oauth.filttr.com/) is another application that can help make sense of all that incoming information, allowing you to sort tweets by groups, keywords and priority, as well as allowing you to create white-or blacklists for content or people.

In the final analysis, there probably isn’t one single social networking platform that serves every need. Twitter really isn’t sufficient for providing highly detailed communications. However, for those academics seeking to start conversations with colleagues and students, or seeking to provide timely updates on research projects, Twitter, with its brief, unobtrusive flow of information, may be just the right tool, especially when paired with Facebook or a blog. The key is matching the right social networking tool with the right purpose. So consider putting down the phone, take your thumbs off that thumboard and get to tweeting!

References