Twitter can be very noisy due to an enormous amount of tweets and random people who can make their way into your timeline. In the beginning when you are trying to become accustomed to the twitter culture, twitter lists, faves, retweets, and obtaining followers may seem like another exercise of gaining friends on Facebook. Unlike Facebook, twitter will never ask, ” Do you know this person”? This lack of barriers provide a unique opportunity for twitter users to seek out collaborators and allies for a particular cause, shared passion, or to community organize.
Private accounts on Twitter receive the least amount of connectivity and interactivity. Most people will not follow back a private account because you can’t retweet anything insightful or informational posted by a private user because its private. If you approach Twitter with no expectation of privacy and that everything you tweet will be for public consumption, your experience and how you use it will begin to take new form.
This is week three in the Live Twitter Study I am conducting to explore the practical uses for twitter in the scope of social work practice and policy. On Sunday, we will be discussing how to use twitter to community organize and identify non-social work allies, as well as discussing why creating non-social work allies are important to promoting social work policy and practice.
Also, I am asking participants to be prepared to share @organizations and/or any hashtags for the purpose of creating a twitter list of allies and possible collaborators for everyone to have access. Also, we will be discussing twitter reach and what it means in terms of disseminating an awareness campaign, action alerts, important resources, or urgent information as a prelude to understanding potential reach.
Join us on March 30th at 3PM EST to discuss using twitter for community organizing and creating allies using the hashtag #swhelper. Be ready to @ your favorite nonprofits and organizations to share because you believe they should be natural allies to the social work profession.
Also View:
Beth Kanter’s Community Organizing Twitter Rules
