What to do
- Use Twitter to tell your story to people.
- Use Twitter as part to your life-long medical education.
- Use Twitter to filter the avalanche of medical research so you spend your time on only the best stuff.
- Use Twitter to participate in the rich back-channel commentary that occurs during every medical conference.
General Twitter usage
Engage other users. Use the reply button liberally. Do not be intimidated. Ask experts questions. It is one of the best ways to build a network. I am much more likely to follow someone that engages me. Look at the times lines of some of the rock starts of the medical twitter world, it is filled with @ replies.
Dr. Jen Gunter is is an Ob/Gyn and a thought leader on women's health issues. Her timeline is mostly @ replies, with a few re-tweets thrown in there.
Don't hesitate to unfollow someone. Unlike Facebook, unfollowing people on twitter is common and especially when you are starting to use twitter, one loud mouth can dominate a timeline and make for an uninteresting timeline. The red Unfollow button can be your friend.
If someone's tweets don't fit your timeline, stop following them. You can even stop following God.
If you are going to join a Twitter chat like #NephJC or tweet a conference, using specialized software that is optimized to follow a hashtag is great. TChat.io and TweetChat.com make it easy to follow all the tweets on a single hashtag. Additionally, when you tweet from these programs, it automatically adds the hashtag you are following to the tweet.
TChat.io allows you to filter out retweets.
TweetChat allows you to block annoying spam right from the timeline. Nice.
I asked my Twitter (the answer machine) for some advice on tweeting at conferences. Here are the responses: