There are major advantages and major disadvantages to being followed on Twitter by a large audience.
There was a time, when I first began tweeting, that I thought the ideal number of people to interact with probably lay in Dunbar's
one-hundred-and-fifty... however, once I'd passed that I still felt the value of connecting with other teachers... so reckoned, okay, maybe double that would be okay but then as time went by, that number kept growing exponentially to the point where now, to be honest, it sometimes scares me!
These days I am followed by over 3500 people and follow back over 2000 (my primary focus is on educators as generally I don't really need to have any contact with marketers/ socialmedia-Xperts/ pornspammers/ movie-politics-music fans/ coffee-tea-bathroom-activity-sharers) - and while this number, if you're not a regular on Twitter, might sound like "holy-kaow!" perhaps even something to aspire to... the truth is, I should warn you, is that sometimes the mentions list lists and lists... and with all that comes a sinking feeling of "yikes-how on earth can I possibly answer or acknowledge all this - personally?
There have been days when there were so many DMS that it would have taken well over an hour to respond.
They have been days of Information Overload.
And on those days, when I felt I couldn't answer all the mentions or the DMs or thank folks for the RTs personally, for sending on the right posts by people I respect... that instead of feeling good about being so globally connected, I would commit one of the deadly sins of Twitter and look at others who have managed to manage all this so much better than I do and then I would feel jealous, or inadequate or impossibly guilty... going to bed with the feeling that I've been impolite - catholic guilt - worrying that somewhere out there, there is a teacher who now thinks that I think I am too good to answer her/him back... That thinks I'm a snob. Or not interested in his or her words.
To be honest, at several points when I felt overwhelmed, misunderstood... I thought I would simply have to give up being on Twitter. Of course, I tried to balance that feeling - knowing that that person does not see the same page that I see - that s/he simply has no idea what it's like to try and follow 2000 people's tweets and get it right.
Sometime after the summer as more and more tasks (
slippery frogs) piled on,
I wound up with the conundrum of how on earth could I balance my real work, my quality of life
(going to the gym, talking to friends & family) with setting aside time for social-media and networking with this amazing global edcuational community.
Ages ago, I saw a tweet sent out by
Val360 saying that she loved HootSuite and I wandered over to the site, couldn't figure it out and gave up: way too complex, I thought. However, I decided I really needed to find a way to better manage my Social-Media life.
I went back to Val's recommendation and had a deeper look.
HootSuite lets you manage everything although unfortunately it doesn't make cups of coffee - but since using it, I found that I only spend about a half hour a day on Twitter and sometimes even less - I can quickly chat with my PLN -whoever's online at the moment /but also who was around earlier - I can check out if there's anything urgent I need to help out with; say hey to the general universe, answer the important DMs, favourite the posts I want to read later on or that I think may be worth RTing during the week.
I am also able to set up multiple organizational tabs e.g - EDTECH or ELT, and then I can divide each of these into streams (columns) ~ which is pretty much one of the chief reasons I prefer this tool over Tweetdeck. In each of these columns, I can even manage tweets according to specific feeds, keyword searches or look up specific twitter-lists (private/public) and quickly - it resembles scanning a control panel in an airplane or something - I can see what's hot and what's not, or can help make something important be seen by more people.
Once a week, I tend to go in for longer, quietly lurking while I check on what I've favorited, decide whether or not to schedule RTs and follow-back the other educators who've found me during the week.
I can even manage more than one account: the BELTfree account which
I mentioned on Thursday, this is set to automatically feed blog posts (why I have the Premium version) from ELT Bloggers without logging on and off all the time,
(part of my personal contribution to the community I belong to and my strong belief in democratization of education) ~ I can also organize Re-Tweets not to occur at exactly the same time as everyone else's (to guarantee that excellent links/info/call to action can be seen by a wider audience across time zones).
The premium version also comes with the ability to tweet in teams (if you're a company that may be useful), you can manage your Facebook and LinkedIn updates and you get some pretty powerful analytics on how effective your tweets are or aren't!
Anyway, there's much, much more -stuff I haven't even got around to using yet - so my techtip for teachers and professional
educators interested in social-networking is definitely check out
HootSuite!
Hope that was useful, don't hesitate to ask questions if you've got any!
Karenne
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