Still hard to understand how twitter is this amazing place that you keep hearing about that will change the way you “do business?” I recently got “back to basics” with a school district who asked me to be a part of their professional learning day, and today I’m going to share one strategy to getting started on twitter that you can share with others who are considering jumping in on twitter!
When I first started using twitter, I quit after a while and didn’t use it again until six months after giving it up. I felt like I had missed a lot and that I needed to read all of the tweets that I had missed. I didn’t know at the time that the lifespan of a tweet is about 18 minutes. I was trying to scroll back through my feed and “catch up’ on what I had missed, and the conversations were hard to follow and confusing. Six months later, when I tried it again, I tried something different. I would read through my home feed at least once a day, scrolling back a little to see if there was anything that caught my interest. I began to connect by retweeting occasionally. I also had a personal friend using twitter, and I began to tweet her, which helped me to learn the mechanics of tweeting back and forth to someone. I slowly added people to the list of people I followed, because I was afraid that if I got too many, I would get overloaded by the volume of different tweets.
Today I call this the 5x5x5 plan. When starting out, follow 5 people only and spend 5 minutes per day for 5 days reading tweets. After those 5 days, begin to retweet and comment on tweets. Share your own tweets. Gradually add to the number of people you follow by looking at who your “first 5” follow (not who follows them.) Once you understand the mechanics and flow, start to move from lurker to connected. Don’t spend a lot of time on twitter. Check in daily, read a little, share a little, and stay positive!
Want a step-by-step plan on how to tell your school's story on twitter?
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