Twitter Tips for Teachers – Who Do I Follow?

Twittercounter stats

Once an educator has established an account on Twitter, the next question I generally hear is, “How do I find interesting people to follow?”. This is a great question and there are three techniques you can use to locate great people to follow. With Twitter’s recent addition of lists, you can separate the tweets of people you follow into unique streams around a theme. This means that the people you follow and their information can be organized more easily than ever.

The first technique can be likened to casting  a wide net. It does not focus as much on topics as it does popularity. The idea is that if people are popular, they have interesting content. This relies much on the idea of crowdsourcing or specifically here, using the crowd to select interesting tweeter by following them.  Here are two useful tools:

• Twitterholic uses the Twitter API to scan stats and create most notably a top 100 list. This list identifies the most followed Twitter users. Currently Ashton Kutcher, emurse (jobsearch), and CNN are in the top five.
• Twittercounter also has a top 100. They provide more intensive data and predictions regarding stats. Additionally, you can add their widget to track your stats.

The second method is more focused. It requires slightly more time but provides people that interest you in a specific way. Using education as an example, one could seek people in involved in integrating technology in education, charter schools, or other teachers (#edtech, #charterschools, and #teacher) with extreme accuracy. A useful tool in this category is Tweepsearch. Tweepsearch allows you to search bios by keywords and followers of an account by user name. Pick a topic of interest and you can find people who mentioned this keyword in their bio. Specify an account name and you will be provided a list of their followers. This can be used to find and track people who regularly comment on a topic of interest. The benefit of knowing who is following an account name is based on the assumption that if they are following someone it is because they have like interests. By using Tweepsearch or one of its variants you can quickly identify promising people to follow.

The third component, is using directories to locate people with similar interests. While making it easy to identify people to follow, the number of people that place themselves in such a directory is a small number compared to the total number of people that regularly post on a given theme. Searching a directory by topic doesn’t take very long and can result in some great finds. If you’re looking for educators, the Twitter for Teachers Wiki is a great resource. It groups educators according to discipline (alternative through video) making it easy to follow interesting accounts. Take a look at the Twitter for Teachers Wiki.

Using these three techniques, a new or seasoned Twitter user, can quickly locate quality Twitter users to follow. The power of Twitter really is its ability to share information. In addition, it can provide access to top-notch information. Take a few minutes to add some quality feeds to your Twitter account or follow me (@darylljohnson).

As always I look forward to your comments and ideas. Until next time…