On the road to mastering Twitter

            The biggest feature of twitter to me is the use of hashtags. It has become so popular that people use hashtags on other social media platforms besides twitter. A hashtag is when a user puts a # symbol in front of a word. The purpose of a hashtag is to make a word or topic easily searchable. When a hashtag is clicked or searched for it will bring up numerous posts that contain the same hashtag.

            A good way to gather followers on Twitter is to retweet posts from other users. Retweet means to take a post of another user and repost onto your own twitter page so your followers can see it. It’s a good way to spread relevant information to your followers or other people who have yet to follow you. The people who like it and don’t follow you will sometimes start following you.

            A trend that has started on twitter is a physical social gathering called Tweetups. This is when a user has a meeting or hangs out with other Twitter users. It’s usually good to target the Tweetup to local people as people from further locations are less likely to attend. It’s a good way to make friends and a good way to increase your followers. Usually a user will tweet a location, date and time. If people are interested then the user starts to go over the fine details.

            Twitter has a useful search tool. You can use it to find people or friends on Twitter. If you have a person or friend in mind that isn’t on Twitter then you can invite them to use Twitter through different social media platforms. Twitter lets you search your Gmail, AOL, and Yahoo contacts and gives you the option to invite them to Twitter.

            Also Twitter is a great platform for spreading a message or getting something known. Tons of charitable organizations use Twitter to spread their mission. A user can help that organization as well by following them and then retweeting that organizations posts. Following an organization of Twitter is great because it gives you update news and pictures on the great things there are doing.

This is an assignment from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Collaborative Computing. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc