What is Twitter and why should I care?
From Wikipedia: “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, email, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific.” Anyone who has signed up to follow your account gets your updates as part of their Twitter feed.
Twitter is a lot more fun once you have a group of people you know twittering as well. You can also sign up to feeds from high profile politicians, news services and metropolitan fire departments.
How to get started
Create an account on twitter.com, it’s free. For Mac buffs, download Twitterific. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.
Find some people to follow, including some of the plonistas mentioned in my earlier post, friends who are already using Twitter or search Twitter for other people who have similar interests. You can invite others to join as well.
Most twitter posts, I’ve noticed are about what people are doing as they go through their day. While some of that can be entertaining, I’m mostly interested in Twitter as a shared learning tool, so I try to post one entry a day about something I have learned or done.
Use tinyurl.com to include links, since you are limited to 140 characters.
Twitter as a Plone marketing tool
Mr. Topf provided some excellent suggestions as a comment to my earlier posting about Plone and Twitter. I’ve added a few of my own as well:
- Post interesting stuff about what you learn about Plone to your twitter feed (like “reading nice howto on X: http://…“) and the like. Just look at what sort of posts your friends do
- Talk about projects you are using Plone for
- Provide tidbits on Plone, including new releases, how much fun the community is, when the next Plone event is, interesting Plone screencasts (or do them yourself) and so on.
- Point people to http://twitter.com/plone naturally
Over time, you’ll reach more and more people who don’t know about Plone. Imagine that, people who have never heard about Plone before!