Twitter Basics for Librarians

In honor of the librarians at the Highland Park Public Library

I have been telling the librarians at the library about Twitter. If you put in a little effort at first, you can later use Twitter to increase contacts and resources in whatever area interests you.

Step One: Sign up and pick a username. You are going to need to stick with the name you pick, so pick carefully. It can just be your first or last name with an initial, or you can choose an alias like this one: jedilibrarian. If/when you are ready to represent your library on Twitter, you can use a username that reflects your library. You should also get an identifying user pic (I use my little froggy), because you might stand out a bit more if you have a good picture. You can poke around on Twitter to see what others are using to get some ideas. It doesn’t have to be a photograph of yourself; just something that looks good tiny. You can change the user pic easily later, if you like.

Step Two: Find some people to follow. I’m going to make this easy for you.

Libraries

http://twitter.com/camdencclibrary
http://twitter.com/TopekaLibrary
http://twitter.com/brooklynpublic
http://twitter.com/harriscountypl
http://twitter.com/NMCCLibrary
And then I found this: Libraries on Twitter
And this: Tweeters Directory: Librarians

Librarians, Library Studies Professionals

Note: please leave a comment if you want to be added to this list.
http://twitter.com/bookworm717
http://twitter.com/tealan
http://twitter.com/teresar
http://twitter.com/oleonard
http://twitter.com/jransom
http://twitter.com/TanMcG
http://twitter.com/amylibrarian
http://twitter.com/mstephens7
http://twitter.com/briankelly
http://twitter.com/elloyd74

Organizations, Book Lover Lists

http://twitter.com/alanews (ALA)
http://twitter.com/sljournal (School Library Journal)
http://twitter.com/BookPage
http://twitter.com/librarythingtim
http://twitter.com/UChicagoPress
http://twitter.com/ALA_TechSource
http://twitter.com/librarycongress
http://twitter.com/BookFinder
http://twitter.com/FLWbooks

Step Three: You can find others twittering about any topic by keyword by using search.twitter.com. You don’t have to follow someone to read their tweets (unless they have them protected). You can also learn about hashtags.

Step Four: Write some Tweets. Tweets need to be 140 characters or less. It takes getting used to, but you can learn to shorten “you” to “u”, for example. If you want to Tweet a URL, just paste it into your tweet. Try to fill up your tweet with key words. Let’s say you are writing about teen films. You may want to use the words ‘animation’ or ‘movie’ or ‘film software’ or any other descriptive words. Hash tags can be useful, too; you can find lists of hash tags (key words with a # in front, such as #books or #library) on the hash tag site.

Step Five: Get others to follow you. You can’t force anyone to follow you. But if you provide Tweets with valuable information (valuable is relative, we all have different ideas about what’s valuable!), others might find you and decide to follow you. You will probably also find that if you follow others, they might follow you back. No guarantees.

Step Six: Reply to someone. Did someone Tweet something of interest? You can reply publicly by typing an @ sign in front of their username and then write your Tweet. Like this:
@leoraw Thank you for your post on how to get started with Twitter.

I’m leoraw if you want to follow me on Twitter.

Note my regular readers: if you see ideas that were repeated from old posts, thank you for being such an avid reader! I’m planning to write a series of How To Use Twitter type posts, and I hope to gear them toward different audiences.

Thank you to these Twitterers who helped with this post:
@tealan, @camdencclibrary, @jransom, @briankelly, @tripnmommy
Brian Kelly sent me this post of his: 14 UK Information Professionals to Follow on Twitter? I believe his point is once you get used to Twitter, you should use it to build community, not just to follow the “big” pearls of wisdom.

Questions? Comments? Ideas about how to use Twitter? All welcome.