What is Twitter?

Twitter is the worlds largest micro-blogging site. Posts on Twitter are called tweets, and are limited to 140 characters. Twitter enables you to send and receive messages to and from other Twitter users who follow you.

Why is it useful?
As tweets can be written and posted very quickly Twitter is ideal for receiving breaking news from experts or organisations in your field. Its also a great way to disseminate your news. Watch this 2 minute introduction to Twitter:

Disclaimer As with all professional (non-personal) social media accounts, it is good practice to include a disclaimer in your bio stating how you are going to manage and use your Twitter account. A good example is the SGs Justice and Analytical Services Twitter policy. Take a look at the SG Twitter account. The name of a Twitter account is identified by the use of the @ symbol. The image below shows the SG Twitter account is called scotgov. There are approximately 45 SG Twitter accounts at time of press.

You can add hyperlinks to your Tweets too. Twitter has a links shortening feature, which will automatically shrink a link to 20 characters. Once a Tweet is posted, links may appear as a shortened version of the original link. In January 2011 there was a rush of candidates for the Scottish Parliamentary elections joining Twitter to engage with voters. Theres also the results of a study, which investigated the use of the internet by political parties and individual candidates in Scotland as part of their campaign for election to the UK Parliament in 2010: Baxter, G., Marcella, R. and Varfis, E. The use of the Internet by political parties and candidates in Scotland during the 2010 UK General Election campaign. Aslib Proceedings, 2011. Abstract only. Full text available via your Library. Reply and Retweet Reply and Retweet are two key features of Twitter. A reply on twitter means responding to a tweet from a person while to retweet (RT) is to broadcast (like forwarding an email) a tweet posted by a person to others.

Note that everyone else can see your replies and retweets. To send a private message, send a direct message (DM). In the black bar at the top of the screen, click on the envelope, click on New Message and enter the Twitter name of the follower you wish to send a direct message to. You can only send direct messages to your followers. Trending Twitter operates an algorithm to determine which topics are the most discussed via Twitter users at any given time. The most popular topics are known as "trending topics." Significant world events, international sports results, and news about popular celebrities are among the items that commonly "trend" on Twitter. You can change your trending settings from whats trending worldwide to the UK, and even a selection of UK cities. Twitter lists The first thing most people notice about Twitter once they begin following a large number of other accounts is that it can become really noisy. Only following Twitter accounts you really do find useful is the best way to filter out the noise. Another way to see more of what you want on Twitter and less of what you dont is to use Twitter lists. Twitter lists help you organize people on Twitter into particular and relevant groups. You can create a list in a simple few steps. Once created, all you have to do is click on the list and it will show you the tweets of only the people within that list. Twitter Lists are a simple and fast way to view groups of tweets from the people you care about. You can create public lists so you can share your work in pulling the list together with others, or private lists, so only you can see them. Hashtags
Twitter lists from @scotgov

A hashtag # is simply a keyword that conversations can gather around. Just type the # symbol in front of your keyword (no space) and put it in a tweet. It becomes a clickable link and you can click it to find what other people have been saying with that hashtag. A popular hashtag is #FF or #ff - short for #FollowFriday. Its a Twitter trend created back in 2009 by Twitter users that has since become a customary Friday activity. A #FF is a show of appreciation and a good way to acknowledge other Twitter users. Each Friday you recommend Twitter profiles that you appreciate to all of your followers. The idea being that your #FF recommendation will encourage others to check out that profile, generating more followers for them. Hashtags are a great way of following events. You can't go to every conference youd like to. By keeping an eye on the relevant hashtags, it's possible to follow several events all happening at the same time without leaving your chair. Sometimes it's possible to actively participate in an event via Twitter - asking the panel a question, for example. Hashtags are also useful for following a hot topic, for example discussion around Scottish independence can be found by using #indyref. Within the SG the Twitter account @ReadyScotland is using #RfW2012 to help the public search for advice on preparing for winter. The following image shows results for a search for #indyref.

Searching Twitter

You can search Twitter for people, organisations or conversations using Twitter search. Tip: to search for a conversation, start by searching for keywords that you think will best describe that conversation. Look at the results to see if the tweets contain hashtags. Clicking on the hashtags will reveal additional and more relevant results. There are other Twitter search tools available. For example, Icerocket which searches blogs and Facebook too. Alternatively, if you simply wish to find out if a person or organisation is on Twitter, you can simply Google the name of the person or organisation followed by the word Twitter. Archiving You can download a complete archive of your tweets from your account settings under the heading Your Twitter archive. Twitter used to officially state that search would only find other tweets no older than about 10 days. Now Twitter states that the archive should not be too old to be searchable. So, if you wish to promote or follow an event (by using a hashtag) youll likely find that a Twitter search will not find older tweets, and so you wont have a complete record of all that correspondence. In fact, all those tweets are most likely to still exist but youll need to use other ways to access this archive. There are various way to do this: If you are willing to pay, Hootsuite Pro allows you to Create Tweet Archives. A 30 day free trial is available. There are free methods too: 1. Martin Hawksey has written a tool that automatically pulls results from a Twitter search into a Google Spreadsheet. Though this is quite complex to set up. 2. You can more easily set up RSS feeds for Twitter accounts. Unfortunately Twitter no longer displays an RSS icon, but you can enter the following links into a feed reader. Just edit the name of the account you wish to follow via RSS (shown in bold): http://www.twfeed.com/atom/scotgov There are other tools which enable you to manage your Twitter account more easily than your Twitter homepage. One example is the free version of Hootsuite.

Activities and further help

Read the SG guidance on setting up a Twitter account (SG staff only) Further help on Twitter is available at Welcome to Twitter Read the What is Twitter? guide from Kind of Digital Set up a personal or official* Twitter account Go to Twitter and sign up by entering your name (this will be the name of your Twitter account) your email address and a password.

*As with all official (non-personal) social media accounts, if you want to set up an official Twitter account for your work area, please contact the Digital Communications Team.