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10 Twitter Tools for Learning - Twitter is Cooler Than You Think

August 28th, 2009 written by Julie

Many people think Twitter isn't cool. They see people posting messages like: "I ate a sandwich!" They follow their friends and talk about how bored they are. If you think Twitter is a waste of time, maybe you should take another look. Twitter can be used as a tool to grow as a person. If you do some searching you can find people that you find interesting and can teach you new information. If you are bored, then maybe you are bored with your life. If you are bored with your life, then maybe it is because you have not found your passion! Most people have the potential to grow as a person. What would you like to know more about: photography, sports medicine, politics, stock market, gardening, fashion design, architecture or you want to be an astronaut ? Where do you start?

FIND THE EXPERTS

When researching a certain subject you need to find the experts. Use can use tools like WeFollow, Twellow and TweetTop. Check out your category and dig deep to find people that would have the expertise. If you would like to be an astronaut you can actually follow @Nasa. Once you follow the experts, who do they follow? In Twitter you can click on the link "followers" on their profile and see who is following them. You can check out their bio and see if their friends are interesting enough to follow. Who do the followers follow? In Twitter you can click on the link "following" on their twitter profile. This can sometime be even more interesting. You might even find another expert to follow. You can also use TweetStats (this link is the stats for the user @nasa). This is useful to see who they retweet and who they reply to. This might give you an idea of more experts to follow.

SEARCH

Twitter is a great tool for searching. And when I say Twitter, I mean the Twitter website: http://www.twitter.com. There is a nice search tool that can be used to search for people or keywords. With this tool you can see what people on Twitter are saying. And I mean everyone that has a public account! That means people that you do not follow. Cool isn't it? There are many more Twitter search tools out there. For example, on Monitter you can track three keywords at one side by side! On TweetScan you can follow what people are saying about a keyword and you can set up to receive email alerts about certain keywords. There is another tool that is great for researching. It is called Twootles! With this tool you can actually search Google and Twitter at the same time. Type in a keyword and watch it go!

INTERACT

Now that you have some people to follow, what do you do? Interact! Retweet interesting tweets you see. This can be done with one click in TweetDeck You can also send a message to people in twitter if they also follow you. If you read an interesting blog, tweet about it. Post the link and make sure to give the author or blog, credit.

BLOG

Set up a free blog in WordPress or other blogging program, write about what you have read (and don't forget to mention your experts in these posts). How do you get the word out about your blog? You twitter about it of course! Post a link to your blog post on Twitter. HootSuite will make it easy to shorten your web link and give you tweet statistics as well. The reports from HootSuite will show how far your tweet traveled.

TWITTER IS COOL

So before you abandon Twitter and play games online, think about this: What have you done for your brain today? You can use these tools and more to help you grow as a person. Of course there are more tools than these. If you have found some great Twitter Tools for research. post them here!

Twitter is not just for research. But that will be a post for another day!

Julie D'Aloiso
SpiderCat Marketing, Inc.
@juliedaloiso

Topics: Social Media Blog

Tags: The Breakdown, Twitter