Jeromy Anglim's Blog: Psychology and Statistics


Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Introduction to Twitter | One Academic's First Steps

I have just started using Twitter. This post documents my experience. My aim is to give some suggestions to others who might be considering the adoption of Twitter.
I read some introductory materials:
I organised my Twitter setup
  • I set up an account on Twitterhttp://twitter.com/jeromyanglim
  • I set up a referral from my blog to my twitter account on Twitterfeed.
  • I found a few people to follow: I'd heard about the #rstats tag and recognised a few familiar faces from the R community and various blogs that I follow. I ran some searches using some keywords that interest me and found some more people with interesting tweets.
  • I downloaded a Twitter dekstop client called Twhirl.
  • Once I was following a few people, I used Twubble to get other suggestions. It works on the idea that you may want to follow people that are followed by multiple people that you follow.
  • I installed a Twitter App for my iPhone (Twitterrific).
  • FriendOrFollow tells you about who is reciprocating following.
  • I added an option in Feedburner to add a Tweet button to my RSS feeds (introduction to retweetingretweet button in blogs).

Hashtags that interest me
Assorted ideas for using Twitter that interest me
  • Subjects can have a dedicated Twitter hashtag and students can then use this to discuss the subject on Twitter.
  • The main newspaper I read, The Age, has hashtags associated with many of its articles. This makes it possible to write a blog post, make a comment on Twitter that links the article's hashtag to my blog post, and thereby allow readers interested in the article to read my blog post. Here's an example.
  • I am exploring the idea of having multiple accounts for different purposes.
  • Getting answers and feedback on blog posts or anything else.
  • Providing a record of journal articles that I'm reading and sharing key findings. In particular, Twitter can function as a simple recommendation system for increasing exposure to useful materials.