How do you do relational Twitter?: Developing your Professional Collaboration Network

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Feb 14, 2020 | 0 comments

Editor’s Note: This post is one in a series about how technology can be used to develop and sustain one’s professional network.  The idea for this post came from a think tank hosted by the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work in June 2019, looking for a way to teach students in their new online Doctorate of Social Program (DSW) program about how to develop key stakeholder networks in relation to a substantive topic area. In this series, we are exploring the concept of a Professional Collaboration Network (PCN), which are technology-mediated user-centered relationship constellations designed to enhance or enrich connections, knowledge, and professional opportunities.  This post covers how you can develop and nurture professional relationships with Twitter.

This is the third blog post in a series on using Twitter to create Professional Collaboration Networks (PNCs).  Previous posts defined PCNs and discussed the value of Twitter as a network and how it can benefit lifelong learning, and shared some best practices. There are many professional reasons for being on Twitter, including disseminating one’s own work, announcing happenings, seeking help, and learning from others. To be successful in most of these tasks, you need to be plugged into a social network of people who are motivated to share your work. This post addresses how one moves from using Twitter to follow others and announce your work to developing real relationships with the real people at the keyboards.

This post is built from real-life experience of the amazing professional experiences and friendships that can come from the effective use of PCNs.  About six years ago, I (Melanie, the first author of this post) connected with a small group of social workers who were using Twitter, which led me to connect with folks like Jonathan Singer (@socworkpodcast) who I went on to present and write book chapters with, and Laurel Hitchcock and Nancy Smyth, with whom I spent three years writing the book Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology. Beyond these meaningful work products, social work relationships on Twitter have evolved into sharing meals, spending time in each other’s homes, and splitting Airbnb’s at social work conferences across the nation. Not to mention people I can lean on, and am happy to support on good and hard days.

Some of us have contemplated, from time to time, at what stage the Twitter relationship happens- what are the actual levers that move a tweet to a friendship? It’s harder than it looks to map the actual behaviors, which we (Melanie and Nancy) had to do in early Fall of 2019 when we aspired to teach our new Doctorate of Social Work (DSW) students how to build their own PCNs with an eye to building a lasting network of folks who would support them in their professional development and honor their expertise as social work professionals.

We started by assessing the common problems and traps that people fall in when using Twitter as a professional tool. First, there’s the announcement trap: you get on Twitter and say “New research suggests that mice eat cheese.”  This informational post (or even a more compelling one about social work research) is not likely to be seen by anyone, because as a new user of Twitter  you may have no followers, and it’s information that one could get more easily from a known source or user. Even if it’s novel information, it’s unlikely to engender the reader to the writer because it offers no opinion or personal meaning. It also has  no call to action, and not a single hashtag that connects it to other groups talking about the same topic.  

Another common new-on-Twitter move is to follow all the professional organizations and biggest names in your field. Those folks are likely to be announcers, and unlikely to be in the space to develop collaborative relationships. Although they may deliver information you want to know, you’re unlikely to become a co-author or house guest, or even get a retweet out of the relationship. Follow them, but don’t expect sparks to fly.

Another bad move is the self-promotion angle. Maybe you’re on Twitter primarily to disseminate your very cool intervention- but if that’s all you do, even if you attempt to do it relationally, you’ll sound more like a spammy advertiser than a person in the space for mutual relationships. Remember the Facebook friend from high school that didn’t send you a direct message until they started selling Amway?  Yeah, that person, don’t be that person.

A fourth risk is the consummate professional trap. Imagine being a lawyer who walks into a mixer event, and everyone who asks how she’s doing gets responses like, “may the record reflect…” Ok, maybe good for a laugh, but the “always on” professional isn’t likely to deepen online relationships, because relationships take vulnerability, humor, and the risk of letting people know who you are as a whole person, not just your profession. Be the whole package. 

Vulnerability, humor, authenticity… doesn’t the code of ethics warn us against that?  No! The code of ethics says we must protect client confidentiality, that we should be careful of personal exposures that might interrupt our work with clients, and that we should be good representatives of the profession. So what does that look like in a setting where people can’t see you, hear your tone, or get to know you through shared in-person experiences?

Think about the mixer event again… and bring your mice research. You wouldn’t stand alone and say to the wall, “Mice eat cheese.” You might say “Did you hear about the new research about mice eating cheese, Melanie? Do you use cheese in your practice?” You’d engage someone in the conversation, and then demonstrate your interest in what they have to say.

On Twitter, this looks like, “Research says mice eat cheese. @melaniesage, do you use #cheese in your practice?”  <insert gif of dancing cheese to get Melanie’s attention.>

Here are 20 tips for building collaborative relationships on Twitter.

1. Start with a plan. Who do you want to know? What kind of people can support your professional goals (dissemination, mentorship, feedback about your work, mutual support). Follow select people with those things in mind.
2. Engage like you would at a party or networking event. Find a group mid-conversation and work your way in. On Twitter, a “reply all” makes you part of the thread, and keep up. Laugh at their jokes (with a comment and/or gif/emoji). Retweet their comments sometimes.
3. Give compliments. When you retweet my good advice about delivering mouse interventions, say “Melanie always has good ideas about cheese! Thanks Melanie!” When I know you’re following/are interested in my work, I’m more likely to follow you back.
4. Have a descriptive profile and picture.  When I see your kind words I will probably click on your profile to see who you are and decide whether I want to follow you. If you are anonymous or have a profile that says “ordinary human looking for friends,” I am less likely to follow back. If you say “I am a doctoral student researching the intersection of mice and cheese, also interested in social work,” you’re more likely to get a follow.
5. Share your good work. One reason for being a professional on Twitter is dissemination. But don’t focus on yourself all the time- about 10-20% of your posts should be about your own work. Otherwise it will look like your agenda is about self-promotion instead of relationships.
6. Hang out in places the people you want to talk to hang out. In this case, hanging out means using the same hashtag, reply to, tag, and retweet. Although there are some formal collections of people on Twitter who maintain their own websites and chats, people mostly gather around hashtags. This is confusing because some hashtags are clearly designed to connect groups of people (like #swtech) and some are just people tweeting about a similar topic (like #CBT). The connecting groups hashtag is more likely to be a non-common word that isn’t clearly identifiable as a term on its face. Those people are more likely around for connection. You’ll find these special tags by watching the hashtags people use who seem to be having conversations about topics you’re interested in. 
7. Tag people in. When you’ve got something to say you would like particular people to see, add their twitter handle to your post or add a picture and tag them in the picture. They’re more likely to see it and reply. Don’t abuse the system- don’t tag the same person more than about once a week unless you think they’d REALLY want to see a particular thing. (Note: some people don’t like to be tagged in posts at all- better to do this after some other relational moves.) 
8. Be generous. You can “introduce” people to each other like you would at a party, promote the work of a peer, give shout-outs and congrats to people who are celebrating victories, and keep an eye out for information that would help a colleague. Make praise public and critique private. Don’t tear apart the work of would-be collaborators on Twitter. These acts of kindness demonstrate your collegiality. 
9. Be human. Share a picture of your cat, your walk in the woods, or your favorite restaurant. These are humanizing behaviors that make you relatable.  Depending on your professional role and agency connections, you may be cautious about sharing about alcohol, your children, or other more personal or controversial topics. Don’t share anything that you wouldn’t want printed in the paper.
10. Use visual cues like gifs and emojis in posts and replies. Images with pictures are more likely to get seen and replies.
11. Build trust and reputation.  Do this by fact-checking info you reshare, sharing valuable information, and behaving in honorable ways in communications.
12. You’re most likely to connect with people at a similar professional level. Although Twitter does have a democratizing effect that allows relationships to happen across traditional hierarchies, it is less likely that someone with 100k followers is going to follow you back or reply to your messages; mostly because their goals are likely different at that professional stage. Find people who demonstrate that they are on Twitter to talk to others.
13. Follow-up on others’ tweets and replies. One way to assess the likelihood of someone replying back to you is to look at their tweets and replies- do they usually respond to questions, carry on conversations, and follow people back?  If not, they’re probably not relationship material. 
14. Which doesn’t mean that you can’t communicate with a rockstar in your area. When I’ve really wanted to connect with a top researcher in my field I use these same tips- retweeting their work, compliments, replies… it hasn’t landed me a homestay invite, but has gotten me a follow-back, which opens the door for direct messages.
15. Remember that relationships take time… a first “ask” should not be “can you proof my dissertation?” A better ask is “do you know anyone writing about cheese interventions on Twitter I should be following?” Work your way up to the dissertation ask through a series of give-and-take moves.
16. Move your relationship outside of Twitter. If you’re going to the same conference, offer to buy coffee or ask for a lunch meetup. Send a direct message- this is one-on-one and more personal than public replies. Ask for a meeting on video via Zoom. Send a thank-you note to their office address. If you do any of these things, have a clear purpose and an ask that matches the degree to which you’ve built a relationship so far- think back to those in-person mixer events. You would no’t go from, “what’s your favorite intervention” to “can we talk in private” in the same breath. 
17. Consider lower-stakes to higher-stakes collaborations. Maybe early in the professional relationship you propose a shared poster session at a conference, or a low-stakes writing project before a higher-stakes one, but these working projects offer a great way to learn how well you’ll work with someone and deepen a relationship. 
18. Be present.  It takes a minimum Twitter check in of about three times a week to demonstrate Twitter presence and be engaged in responses.
19. Boundaries are welcome with your digital relationships too. It’s okay to take a break from Twitter to maintain healthy boundaries and support your own self-care. Additionally, pruning (a term Howard Rheingold uses which involves reviewing the list of people you follow) is an important practice to avoid getting overwhelmed with too much content in your twitter feed. For example, you may think that users X, Y and Z share valuable content and are helpful contacts to make,  but then user Y stops participating on Twitter for months or suddenly starts tweeting very often about topics that have little interest to you. If this is the case, you may want to stop following Y. 
20. These tips work well in other digital spaces and in real life. Many of these tips don’t just apply to Twitter. They can help with other social networks such as LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. You can also use these tips in your face-to-face interactions.  In fact, we encourage you to make connections with digital networks in-person and vice versa. 

You don’t have to do all these things every time you log in to Twitter- start small. A short agenda includes:

• Set your intentions or goals- what do you want to get out of Twitter, and who can help you with those goals? Look for some specific people or hashtags.
• Use some of the relational moves listed above to work on relationship-building.
• Move your relationship off Twitter into another space- physical or online- to deepen your connection and evolve from “follower” to friend.
• Be patient with yourself and this process – it takes time to develop twitter relationships.

Whew, that’s a lot! Notice how many of these “moves” mirror relational steps in face-to-face connections. Relationships, traditional or online, take some work! But the Twitter-verse is vast and opens up amazing opportunities for you to find mentors, colleagues, collaborators, and even lifelong friends. We think the effort has a high pay-off!

How do you use Twitter to build professional relationships? Please share your thoughts or questions in the comment section below.

How to cite this post:

Sage, M., Hitchcock, L.I., Michaeli,  D., Young, J.A., Bakk, L. & Smyth, N.J. (2020, February 14). How do you do relational Twitter?: Developing your Professional Collaboration Network [Blog Post]. Retrieved from Teaching & Learning in Social Work website: https://www.laureliversonhitchcock.org/2020/02/14/how-do-you-do-relational-twitter-developing-your-professional-collaboration-network/