It’s no secret that many of us at ProfHacker are big fans of Twitter, using it for everything from conferences to classes to bot-making to, yes, posting pictures of our cats. Several ProfHackers have shared their favorite tools and hacks for working with Twitter: Natalie gathered several of them in her recent retrospective post. This last weekend served as another reminder that Twitter can be a powerful place to experience a simultaneous happening, as the fallout from Friday’s shooting at the University of California Santa Barbara spawned several vast online debates, including the confessional and confrontational #YesAllWomen hashtag. Coming in the wake of declarations that Twitter is “dead”, such moments provide further motivation to me for using Twitter.
However, summer is always a strange time for my Twitter use. Unlike during the school year, when a regular schedule of office hours, meetings, and conferences tends to send me regularly to Twitter, summer is filled with unpredictable bursts of work and travel. Thanks to this inconsistency, this will likely be the last week for a while where I reliably check Twitter, and I’m planning ahead for strategies to avoid missing important events and conversations.
I’ve found some tools particularly useful for setting up my summer Twitter usage. I’ve been using Martin Hawksey’s hack as recommended by Mark for keeping a Twitter archive on Google Drive, and keeping tabs on more than just my own account. If you prefer an automated (paid) solution that allows for tricks like this as well as maintaining multiple hashtag archives and other data connections, Zapier offers a range of useful tools for connecting web services. I’ve been trying it out as a way to keep all the things I’m watching on Twitter archived and easy to analyze. Recently, Lisa Rhody looked at the powerful open-source tool NodeXL as a solution for analyzing a social network. This same tool can also be applied to looking at hashtags, which is great for checking in on a conference (or for getting a first sense of something larger, like the #YesAllWomen discourse space.)
Finding a balance with social media services like Twitter is only getting more challenging as networks grow larger and larger and more scholars chime in online. Finding ways to manage the information deluge (such as Natalie’s recommendation of lists) is essential, especially when time connected is short.
How do you use Twitter during the summer? Share your advice and tools in the comments!
[CC BY 2.0 Photo by Giorgio Montersino]
