How to do all sorts of stuff on or with Twitter - my fairly useful posts that are tagged "Twitter tips"

Jump to the list of posts ordered with most recent first.

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I've been writing this blog for about four years and covered quite a lot of topics including technology, diabetes, science communication, film music and anything that takes my fancy really. Probably my favourite posts are the ones on how to do something, usually on a computer. They're fun to write (you just write what you did!) and are useful to me, because a year from now I'll have forgotten how to what I did a year ago.

These are what I consider pretty useful posts about using Twitter. I might do a round-up of posts that are about wrestling with Word and the internet more generally. With Twitter and Word it's generally me that's acting as the 'expert' sharing what I've discovered but my posts about the internet are often 'help' and that's where the comments can make life a lot happier.

I thought it also might be interesting for anyone nosey to see exactly how many 'hits' a post actually gets (note I also publish annual statistics for this blog, based on Blogger stats mostly - I think you need to divide by two thirds to get more realistic figures!).

In the first list there are four numbers below each post - the first is the flattering page count that Blogger gives you, the second is the much lower (but much realer) pageview count from Google Analytics. The third number is the number of unique pageviews and the fourth is the average time spent on the page.

In the second list I've just put them in date order (most recent first) in case you just want to look at more recent posts - note that I do tend to amend and update older posts, until it gets to a point that I treat them as archival.

First list

Thursday, 7 June 2012
What happens if you block someone on Twitter? What happens if they block you?
148,500 (an outlier!) / 57,470 pageviews from 55,997 unique visitors spending 4.14 minutes on the page
- the most popular thing I've ever written and, as always, I wrote it very quickly after making the observation that an awful lot of people don't seem to have worked out that blocking someone on Twitter does not stop them from seeing your tweets. Since its initial publication I've added answers to questions that people have sent me, or if I've spotted what they've searched for on Google I've answered that.

Monday, 30 May 2011
A list of tools for finding or capturing tweets
14,396  8,307  5,887  3.03
- pretty useful though about to keel over from its bigness. I update it roughly twice a year. Never get rid of anything though, just block it out, so it's kind of a historical record of all the cool stuff we used to be able to do up until 2011 when social media went a bit crap (personal opinion).

Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Curated posts: liveblogging science conferences - my thoughts on tweeting medical research charity conferences
858  220   162  4.13
- a post that has changed its remit as time's gone on. Initially it was a response to the hoo-ha that ensued when Daniel Macarthur tweeted from a biosciences conference, and my reflections on the 'ethics' of delegates reporting things from medical research conferences (particularly where patients are also watching). Now it includes all sorts of posts about the infrastructure of conference tweeting and is pretty regularly updated.

Saturday, 5 March 2011
Trapping tweets for archiving eg at conferences, or curiosity
593  295  258  2.00
- not bad. A little out of date (need to block out Twapperkeeper) but nicely divided into WHAT (stuff you want to do with tweets) and HOW you can achieve that with the tools).

I've actually written a much more recent post on the work blog about how to use Storify to get conference tweets, see Using Storify to maintain a collection of tweets from events and conferences – a ‘how to’ guide

Friday, 22 March 2013
Thwarting spammers on hashtag livetweeted events
500   140  125 3.42
- I had a flash of inspiration, this one works well.

Thursday, 19 July 2012
Using free tools to capture a handful of tweets or a larger bunch
438    173  132   3.29
- people who say "people often ask me" sound a bit smug but people do often ask me about Twitter tools, and these are the ones I use most often or have played around with most.

Thursday, 17 January 2013
Twitter archives available: what I tweeted about in September 2008 - and how to get the original URL
385 115   91 2.55
- that delightful moment when you can access your entire history of tweets. Mine are four years' worth of me being delighted about stuff on and offline, I enjoyed reading them. There's also How to share your Twitter archive via your public Dropbox though I'm not currently doing so myself (again, ethics).

Wednesday, 4 May 2011
Some quick thoughts on Storify as a mini archive for Tweets
348  191 165  4.48
- still fairly relevant, more about how Storify works rather than a how to (for that see Using Storify to maintain a collection of tweets from events and conferences – a ‘how to’ guide. One of the first things I ever tried with Storify was to find it how it saves tweets, and I discovered that if you save a tweet there and the person deletes it from Twitter it will remain in the Storify story.

Wednesday, 26 October 2011
If you're using Storify for conference or event tweets you *might* be doing it a bit wrong-ish, suggest Chirpstory :)
316   126    105  3.22
- Storify is fantastic and getting better all the time, it's also very pretty. Slightly less pretty, but better for a metric beeptonne of tweets, is Chirpstory. Storify lets you grab 20 at a time and I don't think it lets you easily deduplicate (though you can get rid of RTs). Chirpstory grabs 50 at a go and is easier for captures where you have to come back and add the new tweets. In doing so you end up recapturing some of the older ones as well and it's really easy to get rid of those on Chirpstory, less so on Storify. Both let you reorder tweets in either direction (newest first or oldest first) though Chirpstory already had these features before Storify.

Thursday, 28 March 2013
Things you're doing wrong on Twitter (well not you, obviously)
256 views 54   51 6.04
- an important lesson to learn in life is that others don't think as you do. Despite this I'm still surprised to see people sending @messages when what I suspect they wanted to do was send an .@ message, to 'break' the @ and let the rest of their followers see the message that they're sending to the world while still referencing the @person, as opposed to just sending it to the person. What surprises me is that I just worked this out from spotting a few other people doing it (and realising that I was suddenly able to see messages) and adopting it. I just assumed everyone did, but then I discovered that 90 per cent of computer users don't know about Ctrl+F. That slightly blew my mind - bad enough that people are searching documents by visual scans instead of leaping to their word or phrase of interest - but the fact that it really hadn't occurred to me that everyone didn't already know this.

The post is also a tiny bit about how to use search on Twitter to see what people are saying about your business. 

Sunday, 5 February 2012
Anatomy of a tweet - the New New Twitter version
209  55   47 1.25
- when you hover over, or click on, a tweet - while using Twitter.com - a little world of information opens up. You can get the web address that will let you share the link to that tweet (directly) with someone else, find out when it was sent and do all the usual stuff of retweeting and favouriting.

Sunday, 12 May 2013
How often has that tweet been retweeted? Here are some ways to find out
196 views 51  47 5.27
- another 'people often ask me' one, vaguely related to engagement (as in are people interacting with that tweet). My handle on this is relatively basic - you can pay people / pay for apps that will tell you a great deal more. Useful summary at the top.


Sunday, 11 December 2011
Quora questions I've answered about Twitter and hashtags

118  44   27  3.40
- Love Quora, the sort of thing I'd want on a desert island. 

At the time of writing (the post) here were the questions I'd had a go at answering.

• Would writing a Twitter Bot get me banned? No / depends
• Is there a reason to register a hashtag with a place like tagdef? Possibly not
• How can I search for tweets that are older than what's archived on Twitter? Up to a point yes, but fiddly
• Is there a way to archive tweets from a hashtag after a certain period of time? Up to a point yes, but fiddly
• What is the etiquette on tagging things on Twitter? Freestyle
• Did @mentions exist before Twitter? If so, how? Yes
• Are there any tools/ services that provide a way to curate, select and publicly display / publish tweets with a specific hashtag? Yes
• Why do people put a dot in front of tweets? Wider sharing
• On Twitter, why do people put a # sign in front of a word? Tagging
• What are the best tools for Twitter chat transcripts and why? Loads

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Second list

By date, ordered with most recent posts first

Sunday, 12 May 2013
How often has that tweet been retweeted? Here are some ways to find out

Thursday, 28 March 2013
Things you're doing wrong on Twitter (well not you, obviously)

Friday, 22 March 2013
Thwarting spammers on hashtag livetweeted events

Thursday, 17 January 2013
Twitter archives available: what I tweeted about in September 2008 - and how to get the original URL

Thursday, 19 July 2012
Using free tools to capture a handful of tweets or a larger bunch

Thursday, 7 June 2012
What happens if you block someone on Twitter? What happens if they block you?

Sunday, 5 February 2012
Anatomy of a tweet - the New New Twitter version

Sunday, 11 December 2011
Quora questions I've answered about Twitter and hashtags

Wednesday, 26 October 2011
If you're using Storify for conference or event tweets you *might* be doing it a bit wrong-ish, suggest Chirpstory :)

Monday, 30 May 2011
A list of tools for finding or capturing tweets

Wednesday, 4 May 2011
Some quick thoughts on Storify as a mini archive for Tweets

Saturday, 5 March 2011
Trapping tweets for archiving eg at conferences, or curiosity

Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Curated posts: liveblogging science conferences - my thoughts on tweeting medical research charity conferences

Music that I discovered from adverts

This one is likely to be endlessly updated.

Adverts try and create good feelings about their product, hopefully leading to future sales - and I'm sure this works well, but the one things adverts usually do for me is sell me the incidental music. I'm sure that's intentional. For example I can't drive but car adverts are doing a roaring trade in selling me music or at least flagging it up to me.

In all cases the band name is in bold, it's not always clear who's the band and which is the song title ;)

1. Woodkid - Run Boy Run

This came from an advert for a mobile phone company that successfully managed to get into my consciousness precisely because I realised I had to pay attention to the advert so I could find out what to search for on YouTube. Well done them.

2. Stealing Sheep - Shut Eye

Saw this on a TV advert for the programme Hollyoaks. It seems to be a fairly unpleasant programme where nobody is nice to anyone else (not quite as awful as Come Dine With Me which is just flat-out unpleasantness, with catering).

3. Leila - Underwaters

From the enchanting Avios advert which turned out to be for Air Miles. Since I don't fly (not for environmental reasons and I love air flights, just hate the accompanying check-in faffy interminableness) they're not doing much business out of me for that reason.

4. ALB - Golden Chains
Since I'm a little bit in love with the guy who's running around with his yellow underpants on I thought I'd post the actual advert too. His name's Tom Bennett and he plays both characters.

Short course in flying by arm flapping (power of flight not guaranteed)

Recently I was followed by someone on Twitter who I'm sure is a lovely person but who is offering courses in 'theta healing' (1, 2). I pondered on the nature of these things, in terms of their separateness from everything else. It is possible to 'learn' about theta healing and train someone else in it, and so on, and for this all to happen entirely in parallel (so it seems) to the rest of the world, without any worries about science or evidence ever encroaching onto it.

It's the same with homeopathy really, although recently there has been a bit more of a breakdown in the wall between science and homeopathy where the evidence is now having a real-world effect in reducing the impact of homeopathy on NHS spending for example. The ASA's CAP code compliance team even has pages on its website devoted to what homeopaths may or may not imply in their advertising (see Therapies: homeopathy and Medicines: homeopathic medicines).

With things like therapeutic touch or energy healing where the therapist doesn't have to touch the patient but 'directs their energy' towards them it seems to be an uphill struggle to convince adherents that nothing much is going on. The therapist feels that something has happened and the client feels better for it. In one ASA adjudication someone flogging Reiki even "acknowledged there was little or no published or peer-reviewed evidence but argued that anecdotal evidence, such as testimonials, could support efficacy claims.  The ASA rejected that argument and concluded that Reiki had not been shown to treat the listed conditions."

I thought I should get in on the act and have decided to open up to the public my very successful courses on how to fly by flapping your arms. Thanks to whining by skeptics I have had to amend my claims in light of recent CAP code rulings so I am unable to state that I can actually teach you to fly and can only state that I will teach you the best techniques for flapping your arms effectively.

"CAP has not seen robust evidence to suggest that arm flapping results in any significant uplift and practitioners should limit themselves to claims of availability of courses only."

In the course we will focus on upper arm strength and fluid movement. The course may help you with the following:

• stronger arms
• a sense of buoyancy and oneupmanship over gravity
• better skin
• weight loss
• getting the best parking spaces

Testimonials from happy customers
"I found the course profoundly moving... mostly in the kinetic sense."

"I didn't actually manage to fly during the sessions but we heard that some of the people on the advanced course did manage it. That one costs £600, I'm saving up."

"The course was great - I learned so much and really enjoyed myself. And the plaster cast comes off next week so I'm keen to have another try."

For those who don't feel ready to commit to learning how to flap your arms properly there are also shorter courses in handwaving. More at the links below.

References
(1) Courses: http://www.whitewavehealing.co.uk/courses.html
(2) about Theta healing:http://www.whitewavehealing.co.uk/theta.html

We're going to need a bigger hashtag (iii) - separate session hashtags for big conferences

Big conference, lots of people tweeting in the first place (and people at home tweeting back on the hashtag) and people tweeting from different sessions too - harder to keep up.

How do other large conferences / attendees / watchers handle this? How can filtering be semi-automated (as it is with the main hashtag)?

I did a spot of research (Google) and haven't really found a satisfactory solution. Clearly the obvious way to do it is to have double hashtags for each session, so if there are 15 sessions throughout a two-day conference you could have

#mainhashtag #sesh1
#mainhashtag #sesh2
...
#mainhashtag #sesh15

and so on, although you may well want something a bit more informative than #sesh1 (however as long as everyone knows what it refers to and it doesn't take up too many letters it really doesn't matter that much).

In terms of filtering, it works perfectly - if you search for two hashtags it returns just those tweets so you can easily pull out all of the tweets from Session 12. (NB It wouldn't work to have one hashtag that covered both, eg #mainhashtagsesh1 #mainhashtagsesh2 as that wouldn't let you pick out all of the #mainhashtag tweets as well.)

How successful is this in real use though? Google pointed me to the BlogHer conference where they tried this last year, but the secondary hashtags didn't get that much use - the tweets were tagged with the primary hashtag of course but people didn't use the second one. Brian Kelly's blog referenced a situation where the conference organisears had suggested secondary hashtags but the ones in their app differed from those being recommended in the pocket guide, so a bit confusing.

Is this a cultural thing? Is it that people just need to know about using two hashtags or see them in use, and it probably helps if it's driven by the conference organisers? Or do people not see it as something to worry much about?

Reading the rest of Brian's post indicates that others have had this conversation and most people don't (or didn't at the time of Brian's first investigations into this in 2009) like the idea of using a second tag. Anyway I recommend reading his post on this, I'm a fan of more hashtags for clarity but I also note his final point "It would, I feel, be unfortunate if valuable Twitter discussions were fragmented across different session hashtags."

My previous ramblings on this topic
We're going to need a bigger hashtag(s) (28 August 2009)
We're going to need a bigger hashtag(s) II (5 September 2009)

Medical research charities, what action do you take against misleading health claims?

I wrote this on the LinkedIn group I moderate for people interested in science communication in the medical research charity sector. Possibly it's more helpful to have it on my blog...

Originally posted here  

Does your charity take action against misleading health claims? Do you involve members and carers in reporting bad advertising to the ASA?

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has just published its annual report and talks about the five things it's focusing on at the moment: free trials, misleading pricing, daily deals, misleading testimonials, misleading health claims.

Of these the latter two are clearly of most obvious relevance to charities that support patients and I wondered if any of you do, or have considered (or 'have rejected the idea of') involving your 'constituency' in scanning the internet for misleading claims and reporting them to the ASA etc?

Yesterday the ASA published an adjudication which was upheld against someone trying to claim that they had a cure for Multiple Sclerosis (MS). I don't know who reported it to the ASA but I'm sure there are many other similar claims that are also in need of reporting.

A couple of weeks ago a different advertiser was told off for claiming to be able to cure Crohn's disease, and almost every week there's an advert for a disease or condition that might be relevant to one or more charities.

These would seem to yield an opportunity for new website content and / or commentary on others' news stories, but also as an opportunity of getting patients and carers involved at the outset.

I see this as being something of multiple potential benefits (though perhaps there are disbenefits that I've not thought of, so you might disagree):

(1) taking action to remove misleading adverts

(2) an opportunity to write a news story about the ASA's actions. My former employer Diabetes UK wrote a news story about Diabetone whose adverts were 'banned' by the ASA for being misleading

(3) an opportunity to go back a step and engage in a mini-campaign with members, getting them (a) to be more aware of the scams that are out there if they're not already and (b) do something about it, perhaps under the umbrella of your charity, perhaps not.

I've reported numerous adverts to the ASA and a couple to Trading Standards and am more than happy to help anyone who wants to put in a complaint themselves. There's also the 'Ask for Evidence' campaign from Sense About Science - they're worth chatting to and they work with many charities already.

Interested to hear if anyone else has tackled bad advertising either individually or as an organisation, and whether or not you've done it internally or involved your supporters.

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See also The Nightingale Collaboration which "challenges questionable claims made by healthcare practitioners on their websites, in adverts and in their promotional and sales materials by bringing these to the attention of the appropriate regulatory bodies."