Twitter for Youth Librarians: Part 1

Are you on Twitter? The microblogging service, which launched in 2006, has proven its staying power. According to social media guide Mashable, the site sees over 23 million unique hits a month, and in a ranking by Compete, it’s just behind Facebook and MySpace in monthly views. While it’s natural to lump Twitter in with other social media sites, it serves its own purpose that can stand alone. It’s certainly not for everyone, but if you get the hang of it, Twitter can be a fantastic way to connect both socially and professionally.

The Basics
Sign up for a free account at Twitter.com. As part of the sign-up process, you can check your GMail, Yahoo!, or AOL e-mail accounts to see if any of your contacts are signed up. Twitter also suggests a list of popular users to follow. And that’s it! You can then click on Settings to add more information to your profile like a user icon, website, and short bio. These are all a good idea if you want to attract more followers — no one will want to follow you if they don’t know who you are.

Send your first “tweet” using the update box on your home page. Tweets are limited to 140 characters so updates can be sent as a single text messages. You can choose to receive certain updates (just direct messages or just ones from specific users) as texts to your cell phone and set up your phone to send Tweets in Settings. Besides just reading and updating from the Twitter web interface, there are also several desktop and mobile applications to extend its use. I use TweetDeck on my Mac and Twitterific on my phone, but there are others to choose from including Twhirl and FriendFeed.

There is a lot of Twitter terminology to learn, but a few key concepts will get you pretty far. The most important feature is the @ reply. From the web or any Twitter client, you can publicly reply to another Twitter user by putting an @ in front of their username. Replies sent to you show up in your main feed and on a separate @yourusername section of your home page. By default, you won’t see @ replies sent to other users unless you follow both of them, or if they use the @username in the body of the Tweet instead of at the beginning.

Another useful feature is the ReTweet. If you want to share a Tweet from another user, it’s best to give them credit. Simply reply to the tweet, but add RT to the front. Most Twitter clients have a one-click method of ReTweeting, but it hasn’t been adopted into the web version yet (Twitter says it’s coming soon).

You’ll also see hashtags appended to Tweets. These are keywords preceded by a # and are a way to track Tweets related to a certain subject, event, or meme. You’ll often see popular hashtags pop up in Twitter’s trending topics, located on your Twitter home page. To keep track of a hashtag, just search for it on your home page. You can then save the search and access it at any time.

Lastly, Twitter has just rolled out a Lists feature. Lists allow you to put group users publicly or privately, and then see a feed of just those users’ Tweets. You don’t even have to formally follow a user to add them to a list. Since they’re new, it’s hard to say how users will use lists, but for now it seems to be an easy way to find new people to follow.

For youth services librarians, Twitter can be useful in many different contexts. One of those is to connect with your library’s community. There has certainly been a lot of discussion about whether or not teens are using Twitter in any meaningful way. That’s a whole separate post, though, and not something I’m ready to cover just yet. I actually think Twitter can be more beneficial as a professional development and networking tool. Later this week, I’ll cover how librarians can use Twitter to connect with other librarians, the publishing world, the pop culture landscape, and other local organizations.

Follow the blog @yalibrarians or my personal account @wsquared.

November 8th, 2009  ♥  Technology  ♥  1 Comment »