In my last post, I gave you some tools to help you find the best Twitter chats. Now that you’ve found some great Twitter chats to join (or even just creep), you might be wondering: How can I keep up with all of these great conversations?
The truth is, you can’t always because Twitter doesn’t sleep, but there are some great tools to help you keep up-to-date as much as you can/as much as you want. In the spirit of transparency, I’ll confess: I’m really not that great at Twitter. I’m just not the most consistent user. I could go weeks without checking my feed, and then I’ll check it every day until the next time I disappear. In my new role, I am being more intentional about tweeting with more regularity, but it can still be daunting to try to catch up with everything that’s published. That’s why today I’m sharing two tools that help make Twitter a little more manageable so that you can jump right into building your PLN. Twitter Lists
This is a feature built into Twitter. It’s exactly what it sounds like: You can make lists of people you follow on Twitter. When you want to narrow your browsing, you can simply open that list and browse just the tweeps you want to see.
To create a list on the app, click on your Profile picture. In the menu on the left, choose Lists, then select the Create List icon in the top right corner of the screen. Name your list, describe it if you’d like, then determine if you’d like for this to be a Private or Public list. Private lists can be useful tools if you are curating your own PLN and want to categorize those you follow. For example, you might have jumped into a couple of #tlap chats (Teach Like a Pirate - and who doesn’t want to do that?) and found a few key tweeps who inspire you or pose great questions. You could add just those tweeps to your private list. Lists can also be public, which means there might already be a great list curated that you want to follow. Simply go to the profile of someone you follow, click on Lists (top of the profile underneath the banner image), select the list that interests you, and then click Subscribe on the left. For more step-by-step tutorials, check out Twitter’s Support resources: TweetDeck
I just learned about TweetDeck last week, and it has changed my Twitter game. Seriously, how did it take me this long to discover this great tool? (I told you I wasn’t that great at Twitter.)
TweetDeck, like Lists, is a feature Twitter provides for you. On TweetDeck, you can view your entire Twitterverse in a simple-to-read, easy-to-customise column view.
You can see my deck below. If I were to scroll right, you’d see a lot more columns with different hashtags and chats I like to keep up with, along with columns displaying my Twitter Lists. Pretty cool, huh?
TweetDeck makes it easy for me to jump on Twitter for just a few minutes at a time, view the content that interests me, jump in where I want, and then move on - because, really, the point isn’t that I read every single Tweet out there. I can’t and, frankly, I don’t want to. But I can take in what I want without feeling overwhelmed, and I can just look at the content that interests me, challenges my thinking, and inspires me to grow. And that’s really the point of a PLN - personal growth. Want to learn how to set up your TweetDeck? Check this out!
In the next post of this short series, I’ll talk about just how a Twitter chat works.
Happy learning!
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