Twitter Guide for Adoption and Fostering

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1 Twitter Guide for Adoption and Fostering The Retweet or RT Allows Twitter users to share the best links, tweets, and gems they find from others using the service. To RT, highlight the tweet that you find interesting or useful to others with you mouse. A RT logo will appear click on this and your retweet is complete. To Edit and write your own comment in with the RT use TweetDeck as it allows for this option. Use to find out what stories/posts have been RT d most. Tweetmeme tracks the most popular links on Twitter. Once a link receives enough retweets, it appears on the front page of Tweetmeme. Tweetmeme can also be broken down by categories (i.e. sports, entertainment, and technology). # Hashtag Twitter hashtags help spread information on Twitter while also helping to organize it. If everyone agrees to append a certain Hashtag to tweets about a topic, it becomes easier to find that topic in search. People are able to follow the conversation about a particular topic and it is more likely the tweet will be seen. Although not terribly complicated, hashtags have some unwritten rules. The primary one to remember: don t overuse them. Another simple tip: give your hashtag context. Most people won t actually know what your hashtag means, so give a quick explanation in one of your tweets or, if you re making a hashtag, make it very apparent what it s talking about. #followfriday or #ff an example of a popular hashtag used on a Friday to show others on Twitter which accounts you think are worthwhile following. #adoption or #fostering use these hash tags when relevant on tweets to reach out to the relevant people in this community. Other popular hash tags used in the fostering and adoption industry are: #FosterCarers #adoptfosterchat Remember: Use hash tags so others who are not following you can find your content! If your Hashtag is not so popular you can use the tool Twilert to alert you every time somebody uses that particular hashtag. Trending From news stories and events, to the latest buzz about movies, music and more. The trending topics reflect what new or newsworthy topics are occupying the most people's attention on Twitter at any one time. You will find what is trending the current most tweeted-about topics on Twitter, on sidebar on the right of your homepage.

2 @Mentions These are used to directly talk to another tweeter. For example start the tweet and the tweet is addressed to that person. Don t forget there must not be a space between and the account name otherwise the tweet won t go anywhere apart from on your feed. Sharing images and Video Twitter now directly supports image attachments, so you can upload straight from the main site on to your tweet. There are also many third-party services that people use as a place to store all pictures and videos. We would recommend using TwitPic & Yfrog to upload your photos to Twitter. Pretty much every social site across the web has enabled a quick, no brainer way to tweet your content out to your Twitter network. YouTube will shorten and share your link easily and simply!

3 Search / Discover Use the search tool at the very top of your Twitter page to search for people, hashtags or subjects, to see what people are talking about right now. Advanced Search If you want your search to be more specific you can use the advanced search operators with Twitter search. This tool allows you to search location-based tweets, and set a range of how many miles to include in the search radius. Tweets within date ranges, looking for tweets from or to specific people, referencing specific people, or written in various languages. Here is a copy of all the operators that can be used in Twitter. They are the same as the ones used by Google:

4 Finding and Following People It s important to find and follow the right people. You will want to follow people that will send out useful tweets/ information/ news/ videos/ pictures related to your industry. Also potential carers or current adoption and fostering parents, would be useful people to follow. One of the easiest ways to find these people is to look through another person in the industries list of people they are following. Further-more, a search for one of your industry keywords will bring up people talking about relevant subjects and those that will more than likely be of use to you. Lastly there are tools you can use to follow and find people- Third-party site Tweepz does an admirable job. Tweepz lets you limit searches to specific parts of Twitter s user information (like name, bio, and location), filter results by follower/following numbers, location, and other extracted terms, and greatly improves on the layout of the search results. Twellow Your best bet for finding like-minded Twitter users might be to use a directory, and Twellow is certainly one of the most complete. Nearly 6 million Twitter user profiles are indexed in Twellow and placed into a huge number of categories. You can search the entire lot of profiles, or confine searches to a single category. Twellow also operates a local directory called the Twellowhood. TweetDeck and Hootsuite These tools allow all your social media streams to be viewed at the same time in columns. You can also post to various social media accounts at one time. They are also very handy for searching for keywords or certain subjects, as you can view as many search columns as you like at any one time, rather than having to do search after search. TweetDeck allows you to edit RT s before posting. This is useful when you want to comment on someone s tweets. The applications also allow you to write tweets in advance and schedule tweets for posting if you are out for the day or away on holiday. This means you and your brand can be visible even if you are busy.

5 Posting Links on Twitter It is important to post links on Twitter to useful information/ news/ stories/ blogs/ videos, for others to engage with your Twitter account. As you only have 140 characters to use in your tweet you need to make the most of the space. Twitter now automatically shortens your links so you don t have to use a third party to do so. However, by using a third party application to shorten links such as Bit-ly or Hoot suite, there are many more useful tools that are included. Both allow you to view how many times people have clicked on your link. This is great to see what content is enjoyed by your target audience and what isn t. (You can connect your Bit-ly account to TweetDeck if that is your application of choice.) Lists Twitter Lists feature is a new way to organize the people you re following on Twitter, or find new people. In actuality, though, Twitter Lists are Twitter s long awaited groups feature. They offer a way for you to bunch together other users on Twitter into groups so that you can get an overview of what they re up to. You can create a list that groups together people for whatever reason (the members of your family, for example), below you can see a list of those that tweet about fostering and adoption. Lists are a snapshot of the things those users are saying, which includes a complete tweet stream for everyone on the list. Lists allow you to organize the people you re following into groups, and they even allow you to include people you re not following.

6 TWITTER MEGA TRENDS 2012

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