What is Twitter?
How do I start in Twitter?
Go to: http://www.twitter.com and click on the sign up button. The simple form takes seconds and you can skip the following steps looking for friends if you wish.
Once you’re done, you’ll be asked “What are you doing?”. By filling in the 140 character box, you are starting to publish or “twitter”.
Now there are three more steps:
What’s in Twitter for unions?
Twittering is yet another way of interconnecting with union members as well as with an international community sharing the same interests. It’s an alternative to websites which your members may not visit regularly and to email where in a busy inbox, messages can get lost. It’s also a way of getting started in micro-blogging which is a popular feature of web 2.0 tools – also to be found in Facebook.
The Twitter tool integrates with Facebook and Blog applications – everything is now intertwined.
It’s particularly useful in the USA, Canada, India and the UK at the moment, because subscribers get your news directly on their phones. They can choose how much news they want to get and during which hours of the day.
It’s the cheapest way for unions to get their messages across to members as well as being the most direct and intimate way because they go straight to their phones.
How does UNI use Twitter?
UNI started twittering its news at the time when Twitter offered SMS service in most countries around the world. Now we reach people who follow our feed online or who can subscribe to our SMS service. Find us and follow is by going to www.twitter.com and entering our email address: euni@uniglobalunion.org!
We’d also really like to be able to follow your union news, so please let us know at the same email address if you are twittering!
More help:
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.
Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Feedalizr or Facebook.
Reaching out to people on their mobile phones with these short messages at no cost is quite a fantastic feature! But for now, it only works in the USA, Canada, India and the UK. Outside those countries, people mainly use the Twitter website to see what their friends are twittering.
The Twitter website has about 5 million active users/visitors per month, according to figures published in October 2008.
Prominent uses:
- Large Businesses such as Cisco Systems, Jet Blue, Sun Microsystems and Whole Foods Market use Twitter to provide product or service information
- The Los Angeles Fire Department put the technology to use during the October 2007 California wildfires
- NASA used Twitter to break the news of the discovery of what appeared to be water ice on Mars by the Phoenix Mars Lander. Other NASA projects, such as Space Shuttle missions and the International Space Station, also provide updates via Twitter.
- News outlets such as the BBC have also started using Twitter to disseminate breaking news or provide information feeds for sporting events.
- Several 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns used Twitter as a publicity mechanism, including that of Democratic Party nominee and eventual winner Barack Obama. The Nader/Gonzalez campaign updated their ballot access teams in real-time with Twitter and Google Maps. Twitter use increased 43% on election day.
- The use of twitter by victims, bystanders, and the public to gather news and coordinate responses to the November 2008 Mumbai siege lead CNN to call it "the day that social media appeared to come of age.
Unfortunately, as many of the Web 2.0 social networking tools, Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties – something to always keep in mind when publishing any kind of information on the web!
How do I start in Twitter?
Go to: http://www.twitter.com and click on the sign up button. The simple form takes seconds and you can skip the following steps looking for friends if you wish.
Once you’re done, you’ll be asked “What are you doing?”. By filling in the 140 character box, you are starting to publish or “twitter”.
Now there are three more steps:
- Search for friends using email addresses or keywords. For UNI’s Twitter feed, look for this email address: euni@uniglobalunion.org
- Get people to follow you. So you can go to “Find People” and then click on “Invite by email”, add all of your members’ email addresses and click “Send” so they get a message, inviting them to follow you on Twitter. Let UNI know too!
- Go to your Settings and personalise your profile.
What’s in Twitter for unions?
Twittering is yet another way of interconnecting with union members as well as with an international community sharing the same interests. It’s an alternative to websites which your members may not visit regularly and to email where in a busy inbox, messages can get lost. It’s also a way of getting started in micro-blogging which is a popular feature of web 2.0 tools – also to be found in Facebook.
The Twitter tool integrates with Facebook and Blog applications – everything is now intertwined.
It’s particularly useful in the USA, Canada, India and the UK at the moment, because subscribers get your news directly on their phones. They can choose how much news they want to get and during which hours of the day.
It’s the cheapest way for unions to get their messages across to members as well as being the most direct and intimate way because they go straight to their phones.
How does UNI use Twitter?
UNI started twittering its news at the time when Twitter offered SMS service in most countries around the world. Now we reach people who follow our feed online or who can subscribe to our SMS service. Find us and follow is by going to www.twitter.com and entering our email address: euni@uniglobalunion.org!
We’d also really like to be able to follow your union news, so please let us know at the same email address if you are twittering!
More help:
- Contact me: webmaster[a]uniglobalunion.org
- Visit: http://www.commoncraft.com where web 2.0 tools are explained in quick and simple videos (in English) – really worth having a look!
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