Pruning your twitter garden@halifaxfilmgal & @bitdepth

Presented at Podcamp Halifax on January 19, 2014.

@halifaxfilmgalKendra

Kendra tweets a lot about films with pithy insights and analysis along with some snark.

@bitdepthChris

Chris is a teacher and filmmaker who has been using Twitter since 2006. He tweets about oatmeal and coffee in the morning and films sometimes.

Kendra and Chris met when Chris was explaining Twitter to a friend at a coffee shop. After the explanation Kendra told Chris that he explained it well and they started following each other on Twitter and became friends.

Building it up

How do you build Twitter for you?

9-10% of Twitter accounts are spambots

1 million new Twitter users per day

Rest of the world 35%

Saudi Arabia 34%

UK 12%

US 11%

Canada 7%

Twitter Clients

Twitter for

Android

Echofon for

Android

Twitterrific for iOS

Twitterrific for

Mac

Kendra uses her tablet for Twitter and uses Twitter for Android and Echofon for Android. Chris uses Twitterrific for iOS on his iPhone and iPad, and Twitterrific for Mac on his MacBook Pro.

Who to follow?

can only follow up to 2000 when you start

can only follow 1000/day

Figuring out who to follow is a challenge on Twitter.

Organizing it

Keeping your timeline organized is a challenge.

Hashtags

#halifax

Trendmap

Topsy

#stop #hashtagging #every #word

Hashtags are a great way to find topics that you are interested in and the people who are tweeting them. It's important to not overuse hashtags. You can see what is trending in hashtags with services like Trendmap and Topsy.

Lists

public vs. private

keeping track of things without following

Lists are a great way to stay organized and keep track of what people are saying without needing to follow them. You don't have to be following someone to add them to a list. Lists can also be private or public.

Ratio

1.3 : 1 3 : 1

It can be important to keep track of the ratio of the number of people who follow you compared to the number of people you follow. If more people follow you than you follow, some people would call you a "Twitter snob".

Favorites

(what we call “favourites” in Canada)

curation by favourites

Favorites are a way to let people know you like something and some people use it as a form of bookmarking tweets.

Cutting it down

Sometimes you need to control how you use Twitter and prune that garden.

Muting or Muffling

silence people

silence tags

silence links

Some Twitter clients allow you to mute (or muffle) certain people or hashtags without unfollowing them.

unfollowing

ManageFlitter Follower Wonk

Kendra uses ManageFlitter and Follower Wonk to keep track of various statistics about who she follows and who follows her.

– Nathan Yau

“data is a representation of real life. It’s not just a bucket of

numbers. There are stories in that bucket. There’s meaning,

truth, and beauty.””

ThinkUp

ThinkUp is a new analytics site that just launched that Chris uses to find out interesting and positive information to make your social media experience more social.

Harvesting

Twitter Archive

you need to request it

you download the tweets

Twitter only makes your last 3200 tweets available. If you want to go back further you need to request your Twitter archive on your settings page.

Tweet Library

Watermark

Chris uses Manton Reece's iOS app called Tweet Library that lets you organize your Twitter archive as well as create collections of tweets. You can also use his web-based service Watermark to do similar things.

Timeline Collections

Create in Tweetdeck

Share tweets in a custom timeline that you can embed

Another way that you can organize tweets is by creating custom timelines in Tweetdeck (with either the app or online).

Where are you going with Twitter?