A gentle introduction to Twitter for the apprehensive academic

Tuesday, 14 June 2011

If I tell people I’m on Twitter, I tend to get one of three reactions:
a) Isn’t it all about what Lady Gaga had for breakfast?
b) How do you find the time?
c) You?!!! (Implication: Twitter is for hip juveniles rather than fossilised academics)

This is unfortunate, because Twitter is a valuable resource for academics. If you’re allowing  inaccurate stereotypes to deter you, you’re missing out.
First of all, you have to understand what Twitter is. It’s totally different from email, and more like a news broadcast. People all over the world are continually emitting tweets (very short messages) any of which can be viewed by anyone. You select what you want to attend to. There are two ways of doing this. The default method is to ‘follow’ particular people or organisations who tweet. Their tweets then appear in your timeline, which appears as a scrolling list when you open your Twitter page. The other method is to search for tweets that include a particular word: for instance, if you type ‘neuroscience’ into the search box at the top of the page, you’ll see all the tweets in the twitterverse that include that word, starting with the most recent.
If you want news about Lady Gaga, there’s plenty out there. But if you want information of a different kind, you can follow organisations such as the Royal Society, the Wellcome Trust, Guardian Science, the New York Times, Nature, etc. etc. Most scientific organisations, newspapers, and science journals are on Twitter, and by following them you have an up-to-date news stream about their activities.
It's OK to be a purely passive user of Twitter, just following people who interest you. In the circles I move in, a high proportion of tweets are messages pointing to a weblink, which may be a newspaper or journal article or a blog. This is where Twitter is such a useful resource for the academic: if you follow those who share your academic interests, they will point you to interesting stuff. When I first joined up I was impressed to find that within the first few days, I’d been directed to two new papers in my field that were very relevant to my work and that I hadn’t known about.
Many people remain as passive users, but you’ll get much more out of Twitter if you use it actively and emit your own tweets. Written an interesting paper? Starting up a blog? Twitter is a great way of informing people, but there’s a catch: you need to have followers, a topic I discuss more below.

How do I get started?
You can Google to find plenty of good guides to the mechanics of tweeting. See, for instance:
http://news.cnet.com/newbies-guide-to-twitter/
http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/
However, most of these are directed towards people who do have a keen interest in Lady Gaga’s breakfast, or who wish to use Twitter for business purposes. The suggestions here are to complement the ‘how to do it’ guides with advice geared towards academic users.
Signing up is dead easy: just follow the instructions at http://twitter.com/.
You need a username. Keep it fairly short and avoid numbers or underlines: you want others to be able to remember it and type it easily. You can be anonymous if you wish, but I’d not recommend it: you are more likely to have interesting interactions with others if they know who you are. A brief description of what you do and what your interests are will help kindred spirits discover you. You get the chance to select your avatar, a little picture that appears alongside your tweets. It’s a good idea to have something other than the default picture of an egg - if you don’t want a photo of yourself, you can pick something symbolic, but aim for something to give yourself a distinctive presence. If you want, though, you can start with the egg and change it later.

How do I decide who to follow?
I started out by following my old friend and colleague Sophie Scott, or @sophiescott as she is known on Twitter. We have similar interests and a similar sense of humour, and so the first thing I did was to see who she was following. You can check out someone’s followers by clicking on their username at the top of a tweet. You’ll see their profile on the right hand side, with an indication of how many followers they have, and who is following them. Further clicking lets you see who these people are, and read their recent tweets. So it’s easy to get an idea of whether you’d like to see their tweets on a regular basis: if yes, a single click allows you to follow them.
The people I follow divide mostly into (a) organisations/public media, such as those mentioned above; (b) academics who work in areas that interest me; (c) journalists and bloggers. Although I have friendly relationships with many of those I follow, I don’t use Twitter as a means of keeping up with friends - it’s too public and the short message format is not useful for that.
I suggest you start out by just identifying a few people that look interesting to follow, and see whether you enjoy the Twitter experience. My recommendation would be to keep the number of people you follow restricted to no more than around 100. Many people follow far more than this, but I like my twitterstream to move at a reasonably sedate pace.
Getting fed up with tweets from someone you’re following? You can just unfollow them. They don’t get a message about this, so you can do it without embarrassment.

Active tweeting and attracting followers
You can have most fun with Twitter if you tweet yourself. For the beginner, there is a major problem: if you emit a tweet, the only people who will see it are your followers, and at the outset you have no followers. You may have something very amusing to say, or a really interesting paper just published, but it’s like standing at the top of a cliff and shouting into the wind. To get started, it helps to either be well-known, or to have tweeting friends. You can look for friends and colleagues by clicking on the ‘who to follow’ button, and if you find they have a Twitter presence, send them an email with your usrname to let them know you are there. With luck they’ll follow you, and tell others about your presence. It’s only worth doing this, though, if they are active Twitter users with followers: lots of people sign up but never use Twitter.
You may also drum up followers by following others. This is where it is important not to be too secretive: if I get a new follower, I’ll see their name and the brief bio that comes along with it, and if they look interesting, I may check out what they’ve been tweeting to see if I want to follow them. Twitter etiquette does not require that you follow someone just because they follow you, but following someone is a way of indicating your presence to them.
Another way to draw your tweeting to people’s attention is to use hashtags in your tweets. These act as keywords and are just words with the hash sign attached at the front, such as #neuroscience or #psychology. People who are searching on these topics will find your tweets and may decide to follow you.
If you are sending interesting tweets, the message will spread around the twittersphere and you will gradually get a following. You may wonder how on earth you are supposed to generate those interesting tweets that will persuade people to follow you. You don’t always have to. You can act as a transmitter for other people’s interesting tweets, by using the Retweet button below the tweet. This will just resend the tweet to your followers, preceded by RT and your username.  
You should not despair if at first you don’t have many followers. Although it’s true that a famous name will attract followers in droves, there are plenty of people who aren’t famous, but who have hundreds or even thousands of followers just because they give good value. And at the end of the day, you should not get too hung up on follower numbers. The charm of Twitter is that it lets you reach out to communicate with people all over the globe whom you might otherwise never encounter: a handful of like-minded people who appreciate your tweets is more important than a horde of followers who seldom read your messages.
What about spam?
Many newbies are worried that they will get followed by odd people. That certainly will happen. But the nice thing is that it has no impact on you. I attracted lots of provocatively dressed pouting followers when I started out. But they can follow me as much as they like; they won’t affect my stream of incoming tweets unless I follow them back. Various unsavoury characters will appear as followers for a day or two and then drop away. They hope that by following you you’ll take notice of them and buy whatever product they are purveying, but you just ignore them and they go away. Twitter discourages users who simply see it as a marketing opportunity, and is set up so you can readily report p
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