Developing Your Digital Identity: Twitter

Posted on by zakrzewskit

Developing a professional “digital identity” on social media can be daunting with all of the resources out there. I recommend starting simple and seeing where a couple of profiles can take you on this online journey! I recently completed an online course in “Developing your Social Media and Digital Presence for Higher Ed Staff” and am happy to share with you the resources and information they provided.

Twitter

Twitter is a great place to start and utilize within Higher Ed. Making a separate professional profile from your personal is beneficial to your career and focuses the information you want to get out to certain audiences. With a 140 character limit in its tweets, it simplifies things and makes one really have to think about the info they want to share out in a shortened format. It’s also a great venue for Higher Ed resources, other institutions, software products, etc. and a wonderful way to be connected with your students.

“Twitter is being used to post references, share research, connect with scholars, supplement instruction, and learn. It is really the “water-cooler” for academics to share research, post reports, read news, search for jobs, ask questions, gather information, and curate knowledge. Scholars and professionals are increasingly expressing ideas and linking to relevant websites, videos, articles, images, etc. related their disciplines or functional areas. “(https://institute.onlinelearningconsortium.org) 

After getting acclimated to your first professional Twitter account, consider creating individual accounts for different classes down the road. Think of Twitter as a positive tool to implement in your teaching and learning and remember to try to stay active on your account. Becoming stagnant in social media will result in losing interest and followers so even if it’s just a few retweets of others’ content every day or every other day, your audience will stay engaged!

Don’t be afraid to connect with other scholars, instructors, and students out there. Comment on others’ posts, retweet others’ content, create #hashtags (explained later below) to engage the community in different topics. Ask questions, share ideas, and empower your presence!

Create a Twitter Account

To create an account (from source: https://institute.onlinelearningconsortium.org/)

  1. Go to http://twitter.com and find the sign-up box, or go directly to https://twitter.com/signup.
  2. Create a Twitter account. If you are creating a Twitter account for a specific purpose or class requirement, you might want to read Disposable Twitter Accounts for Classroom Use by @ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education
  3. Enter your full name, email address, and a password.
  4. Click “Sign up for Twitter.”
  5. On the next page, you can select a username (usernames are unique identifiers on Twitter) — type your own or choose one Twitter suggests. Twitter will tell you if the username you want is available.
  6. Double-check your name, email address, password, and username.
  7. Click Create my account. You may be asked to complete a Captcha to let Twitter know that you are human and not a spam bot.
  8. Twitter will send a confirmation email to the address you entered on sign up, click the link in that email to confirm your email address and account.
  9. Add a photo (preferably a headshot) and write a short bio about you.

Who to Follow on Twitter

After you initially create your account, things may seem a bit empty! I recommend taking the next step by following other Higher Ed sources. Here are some great links @laurapasquini, the instructor of the OLI course, shared with us:

Academics & Higher Ed Pros on Twitter

Higher Ed Twitter Lists by Laura Pasquini:

Once you begin to follow some of these recommendations above, you’ll most likely begin to see some follow backs as well as Twitter suggesting similar profiles to you. Please follow our own Learning Innovation & Technology team on Twitter at @LIT_at_WIT for our own Wentworth news, events, retweets, and resources! Please also reference a previous blog post here from LIT: LIT is on Twitter!  for information about our own Twitter account and Wentworth accounts.

Hashtags

When tweeting, consider using hashtags to separate your posts to identify categories and keywords such as #highered by using the pound sign before your keyword. From here, you can click on hashtags/search by hashtags to see all of those hashtags used across the entire Twitter site. Creating hashtags for your individual courses such as #MATH2500 could help an individual filter tweets to see the content just for that course. 

From OLI, here are just a few Hashtags to SEARCH and Follow:  

Other Helpful Links

The Twitter Basics:

Other Twitter Tips & Resources: