Social Media: Tarleton Tip Thursday #2 (Twitter)

Welcome back to Tarleton Tip Thursdays, where every week we give you tips to help you harness the power of social media. Last week's tip discussed how to follow professional conferences on Twitter in real time without signing up for an account. (Hint: use the conference hash tag).

This week, as promised, we'll discuss how to archive, or permanently save, your conference tweets.

You can sign up for a free account with HootSuite, a social media monitoring service.  Here are directions on how to create an archive. Or,  several days before the conference begins, you can try using The Archivist, a service that can save tweets online or to your desktop. 

What if you'd like to save your day to day tweets?   There are several services that will do this for you. Note: Your tweets must be publicly accessible to use these services.

Attend conferences virtually with Twitter (image obtained with permission from morguefile.com).

Twistory, allows you to archive your tweets for the last 30 days for free (for $1 a month, you can export your tweets into your Outlook or Google calendar). Or you can try Backupify, which will allow you to save up to 3 social media accounts (including Twitter and Facebook) for free.  Both services have paid account subscriptions that increase your options.

We hope you found this post helpful.  Share your opinion--do you think the ability to archive tweets and/or hashtags will ever come in handy?

And, as always, don't forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook!


Yvonne Mulhern is a librarian at Tarleton State University and a co-director of the Texas Social Media Research Institute.

Social Media 101: Blogging for College Students

Many college students may wonder how writing a blog could ever help you with career goals.

“Blogging? Isn’t that like a personal diary online,  for anyone to read? How could blogging ever help me in my career goals? Isn’t blogging for moms or people who never moved out of their parents’ house?”  

Blogging isn’t just for people who want to “share their feelings” and hope that someone responds; Blogging can also be a great tool to develop yourself and showcase your skills, regardless of your major or any career interest. 

Rosie Templeton, the writer of Absolutely Agriculture, is an agriculture communications student from Canada who writes about agriculture. Writing every week showcases her writing skills and knowledge about agriculture.

The Cattle Battle blog header. Obtained with permission from Rosie Templeton.

Blogs are a great way to share your opinion about your passion, or whatever it is that gets your heart pumping. The Cattle Battle is a blog written by Jeralyn Stephens, a graduate student at Tarleton State University. She writes about everything from her experiences with products she tries to Tarleton traditions and even her marathon adventures.   

Jeralyn also has includes key elements that make her blog exceptional for career preparation; under her “work samples” tab she shares her resume, writing samples, design samples, internship reflection, and more. Her blog offers the opportunity for someone to see what a professional individual she is and hire her. 

The Cattle Battle blog header. Obtained with permission from Jeralyn Stephens.

So whatever your major-- if you are passionate about it, why not share your story?

Follow this blog for more tips on how what information you should include in your blog and where to start.

Tarleton Tip Thursday!

From now on, the TSMRI blog will be featuring a new social media tip each Thursday.

Today's tip concerns Twitter.  For those of you who are "Twitter curious", there are several great ways to explore the site without signing up for an account.

One is to virtually follow conferences.  Most conferences now offer a hash tag (the pound sign, #, followed by a keyword) so that people looking for related tweets can find them all on one webpage.  This lets you keep up with conversation, network with others and find great resource links--free!

For example, Friday, January 20 - Monday, January 22 is the American Library Association's MidWinter Conference in Dallas, Texas.  Their hashtag is #alamw.  To pull up related tweets, you can do the following:

• Go to Twitter Advanced Search  
• Type #alamw into the box and click Search

The default view is for  the top tweets--updates that have been re-tweeted (or re-broadcast) the most by other Twitter users. To view all related tweets, click All near the top of the page.

What if you want to archive conference tweets?  Great question--and one which will be covered in next week's tip.

Post Conference Wrap Up

Our inaugural Social Media Conference was held last Friday, December 2nd, at Tarleton State University.   Over 200 attendees, presenters, and volunteers came to a wide variety of sessions on social media....

Social Media and the New Year

Do you have any social media resolutions for 2012?  You may want to consider making your Facebook account more private, using Twitter for professional networking, or posting to your blog more (cough, cough).