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Tweets for Teachers - Separate Twitter Accounts?

On Tuesday, July 21, the @One organization graciously allowed me to present a webinar titled "All aTwitter about Tweets for Teaching". This series highlights their questions, and my humble attempt at answering their concerns.

Q. What are the recommendations regarding following multiple interests e.g. personal, professional [on Twitter]?

A. As far as personal and professional interests go, I haven't seen many people who worry about separating those on their personal accounts. Part of what makes humans so interesting is the range and depth of our interests and abilities. I've been able to maintain posts for both education and roller derby in one account so far, and both groups appear to be quite happy (and there is even some crossover interest between the two!) Including your personal interests in your follows & tweets often adds to, rather than distracts from, the conversation.

If your account is strictly representing a class, business, or department/division of your institution, your posts should reflect only the topics that are related to that entity. For a truly personal account: if one particular group of your followers has a different tolerance for posting frequency or topics than another, you'll end up violating their signal-to-noise expectations, and they'll unfollow you. This is one case where you'll want a separate account to serve different purposes.

You may want to secure one account for notifications, such as classroom events, that have a specific audience that migrates over time, and may be better served by separate hashtag filters. This kind of account assumes your audience will discover you by searching on a specific word or phrase, and doesn't absolutely require that anyone follow each other.

Dan from Butte said this brilliantly: "We may want to think carefully about the ethics of "following" students (and having them "follow" us). An easier, more public way, of access is to have students use hashtags so both students and instructors can get to course information and/or input."
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