~~~Research shows that educational institutions are failing to make the best use of Twitter, focusing mostly on branding instead of engagement. This presents educational organizations like archives, libraries, and museums with a great opportunity to...

When my coauthor, Valerie Forrestal, approached me about the idea of writing about Twitter, I never thought that I would be embarking on this magical journey into book publishing. Val, thank you for choosing me to tackle this with you! It was a great opportunity and very fitting after all—we did meet on Twitter many moons ago (sometime in 2009 to be exact).

Twitter is a tool that can be used to share news and information about your organization with the world. The world, however, is an awfully big place, and institutional Twitter accounts can consume vast amounts of staff time and energy only to become another of many voices shouting into the void, hoping to be heard by the people and groups who matter. In order to make this effort worthwhile, an...

If you are just getting started with a new Twitter account, the single most important tip for getting new followers in the beginning is to have a fully completed profile. This means a professional-looking profile picture, a descriptive bio that explains exactly who you are and what you do, a link to your website, and preferably a few tweets under your belt. If you can also find some colleagues or...

Twitter uses an API, or Application Programming Interface, to allow various kinds of software applications to access some of its data and display it in various ways (Wikipedia 2018). This allows developers to build desktop clients, web browser add-ons, and mobile apps that let you not only access your Twitter account through different interfaces and on different devices, but also add functionality...

You may have sent out a few tweets while you were still tweaking your profile, finding and following relevant accounts, and testing Twitter clients, but at some point you should try to settle into a schedule of posting pretty regularly. Don’t worry too much about posting an exact number of tweets every day or every week, but you should aim to post about once a day, and when that’s not...

Your organization’s success on Twitter depends on how well the feed engages with your community. We have discussed in previous chapters about building your social media strategy, creating a strategy on gaining followers, and catering your feed’s content to keep your followers engaged. As you gain followers and as you curate your content, you want to make sure that your feed engages and...

At this point, we have discussed how to bring your Twitter presence to life. All of the chapters before this have brought you here, and in chapter 5, we discussed the concept of pull publishing. Now we will introduce the concept of push publishing. You might be thinking, what is pull vs. push publishing, what is the difference, and what does this have to do with my Twitter feed? Looking at...

In this final chapter, we will discuss how to analyze your engagement on Twitter. The previous chapters have helped you to create a successful engagement strategy on Twitter. We have equipped you with tips and tools on how to execute based on best practices and successful campaigns at different organizations. It is important to not just rely on best practice and what works for others; you will...

The UCF Libraries makes use of its various social media platforms to communicate library information, share interesting content, engage our community, and show our sense of humor.

Valerie Forrestal is the web services librarian and an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She holds an MA in media production from Emerson College, an MLIS from Rutgers University, and an MS in service-oriented computing from Stevens Institute of Technology....