NpTech Tag Summary: Twitter Tips, Tricks, and Tools

Marnie Webb's monthly Twitter usage tracked over the past year and half created with Tweetstats.

The NpTech Tag Summary has been on hiatus to give some space to rethink, reinvent.  I had an opportunity to chat with Marnie Webb about reinventing the NpTech Tag summaries.   Going through hundreds of resources and manually summarizing them each week has less and less efficient way to capture the zeitgeist of the community.  NpTechers have embraced tools like micro blogging/media, social sharing and friend feeds as a way to share information with their colleagues - so the summary needs to reflect this and it can't if friend feeds and twitter tweets and other micro media nuggets aren't incorporated.   So, with that said, I'm now beginning to monitor nptech twitter tweets, friend feeds, and other sources and incorporate those into the summary. 

My initial thinking is to make the summaries briefer, focused on social media, theme oriented, but publish more than one per week.   How does that sound to you?   Nothing set it in stone, and suggestions and advice is more than welcome.

The theme for this summary is Twitter.

Twitter Adoption

Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about twitter use on college campuses amongst students and faculty.   The article points out the advantages and disadvantages.  A new point: The immediacy of the messages helped the students feel more like a community.  Twitter as a community building tool.

While some may find the 140 character limit of Twitter too constraining, it could get you thinking creatively.

Interesting Nonprofit Example

When Frozen Pea Fund launched back in December, 2007 to raise money for breast cancer research and support Susan Reynolds, one of the campaign tools was PEAple.   This was a twitter hack that allowed tweets from people in the group to aggregated in one feed.  Just last week, this technique was used by the NTEN for the 08NTC Conference making it possible aggregate tweets of conference followers and attendees.  Eve11 wonders, how did they do that?  The answer is here.

Twitter Tips and Best Practices

Chris Brogan has a guest post on problogger called "How I use Twitter to Promote My Blog."  He simply doesn't self-promote his blog posts.  He posts questions, reports or summarizes comments from Twitter, and may ask for a Stumble.   How do you use Twitter to encourage blog traffic?   Not sure?  See ProBlogger's tips for twitter for bloggers.

Useful Twitter Tools

Quotably lets you type in a user name and see threaded conversations.  Here's an example using Marnie Webb  and Laura Whitehead.  This will be a useful tool sweep through and round up the conversations of NpTech folks, although it is a little glitchy.

Ruby Sinreich has identified some more Twitter tools. Specifically, she has discovered some neat stuff for wordpress, twitter integration.

Bleeding Edge

FriendFeeds now integrates with Twitter.  Lots of buzz on this from the fast moving social media crowd.  Give it another six months for nonprofits to explore.  Dave Winer, TechCrunch, FriendFeed Blog, Venture Beat and Mashable.

Need A Good Primer To Explain it to Your ED?

 

The NTEN "Twitter Me This" Webinar also has some great resources and you can download the powerpoint which will save you lots of time if you need train other people on Twitter.

What's your best Twitter trick, tool, or tip? 

The NpTech Tag started as an experimental community tagging project in 2005. A loosely coupled group of nonprofit techies and social change activists decided to use the tag "NpTech" to identify web resources that would create an ongoing stream of information to promote and educate those working in nonprofit technology. Many individuals tag or tweet or friend feed hundreds of resources each week. Through TechSoup's Netsquared project, blogger Beth Kanter, is commissioned to write a summary.

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Comments

[Howard Greenstein]

Found this article via twitter via Marnie Webb. See, it works! Great post, Beth.

[Ben Greenberg]

To your tweet asking about "cool twitter stuff in the last couple of days": I saw Marshall Kirkpatrick tweet about http://tweetburner.com. Let's you track the use of the links you post to twitter. Haven't tried it yet, but it looks cool and is literally just out in the last couple of days.

[Jeffrey Keefer]

Some great resources and links and thoughts here, Beth. Thank you for sharing them.