Today with my Year 9s, we took a look at Twitter and what makes you want to follow a Twitter link or not. As an example, we looked at the @mashable account as the content was relevant to our Social Media unit and Pete Cashmore and his team are generally quite effective at promoting their articles through Twitter. Typically, ignoring the endless parade of retweets, any given Mashable article is likely to be tweeted at least twice through the official Mashable Twitter account. This is where I started with my students.
[caption id="attachment_61" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Mashable Tweet 1"]
[/caption]We looked at two tweets from November 18th. The first tweet was a pretty straightforward, factual approach to reporting the 25 most commonly used passwords whereas the second tweet took a more emotive approach to promoting the same article. When I polled one class of Year 9s about which link they think would be more enticing to follow, they were split almost 50/50 as to which one they would follow. Interestingly enough, the second class (of the two Year 9 classes I teach) was almost unanimously more intrigued by the second approach which listed some of the top 25 most common passwords right in the body of the tweet.
[caption id="attachment_63" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Mashable Tweet 2"]
[/caption]After some discussion about why Mashable might tweet the same article in different ways, the main conclusion that the classes reached had to do with different people having different interests and therefore Mashable was trying to appeal to many different kinds of people. With a little prompting, about where Mashable's 2.5 million followers are located, some clever students realized that Mashable also has a global reach and therefore would send tweets to increase the chances of people in different time zones being exposed to the tweet/article.
The students' next challenge was something that, going into the activity, a lot of them didn't think was actually challenging. Split into four groups of four, each group was assigned a recent Mashable article to read. Once they had read it, each student needed to condense the content of the article into 120 highly interesting characters (140 character Twitter limit minus room for a link to the article) that would encourage a reader to follow the link which would be part of the tweet. Once each person had created their tweet, we posted them anonymously on the front screen and, using Kwik Surveys (worth a look if you're looking for free, online surveys with more features than Survey Monkey), we had the class rank the tweets in order of how likely they would be to follow a link associated with the given tweet.
As you might expect, there were some discrepancies in the quality of the tweets. Some students struggled to understand the character limit (one student submitted a lengthy 265 character tweet). Some students perhaps didn't fully read the article or understand the full meaning of the article and therefore were a little off the mark with their tweet's description of the article. Overall, though, the tweets were reasonably well done.
In one Mashable article, Sarah Kessler writes about Facebook's recently revealed user-tracking secrets. The article describes such Facebook practices as how they install cookies on users' computers; how they keep tracking data for 90 days; and what browsing behaviours it logs. Here, unedited, were the four proposed tweets from this group of students:
- Facebook keeps logs that record your past 90 days of activity
- Facebook revels their secrets on user- tracking.
- How Facebook tracks its 800 million users!!
- Facebook tracks users by installing cookies on computer.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="350" caption="Cookies: Too Technical for the Average Person (Photo from Flickr by Sifu Renka)"]
[/caption]When polled, 75% of students in this class selected option three as the tweet that would most interest them to follow the link to the article. When we discussed what made that tweet more intriguing, some of the key points that came from the students were that it used a fact; it quoted a large number that added to the amazingness of the information; and the exclamation marks added a sense of urgency as if you needed to see how Facebook is tracking you by following the link to this article. Tweet four was the least successful and when asked why students thought that was, most of them didn't understand the concept of a cookie (mental note: fix that) so the technical terminology got in the way of the communication.
As we looked at the other articles (Demi/Ashton's divorce; Annoying Orange TV show; smartphone dating etiquette), the students started to realize that there is, in fact, a skill to composing a concise, interesting and informative tweet. Some key advice that the students decided upon was as follows:
1. Know your audience
- If you want followers that are not just your friends, you should try to keep your tweets 'professional'
- Carefully consider how grammar, spelling and slang will affect how people perceive the message being tweeted
- Use language that is suitable for your followers
2. Know the content
- Sometimes the most interesting part of the article is in the middle or at the end; make sure to read the whole article to make sure you understand it
- Make sure your tweet effectively reflects the article; you don't want to disappoint someone when they follow the link expecting something else because you will lose their trust to follow future links
- Make it clear what the article’s about but don’t give away the whole story in the tweet (‘leave them wanting more’)
As the class wound down and we debriefed and reviewed what had been learned during the lesson, I gave an informal exit poll about writing tweets. Despite their attitude at the start of the class, most of the students agreed that writing a tweet is easy but writing an interesting, informative tweet that attracts a reader’s attention is quite a challenging skill. Communicating clearly and effectively is a challenge for anyone and Twitter is a great proving ground for cutting to the core of the information.
