I took the opportunity to participate in the #PressedConf yesterday. Described as “. . . a twitter conference (#pressedconf18) looking into how WordPress is used in teaching, pedagogy and research.” it was a pretty impressive number of people and topics covered on Twitter in roughly 20 minute “Tweet storms.”1
Presenting on Twitter was something new to me and I tried to think through some interesting ways to approach things. Given how limited Twitter was I tried to tackle complexity in a few different ways while taking advantage of the way Twitter treats different content integrations.
The Post
I ended up deciding to build out a WordPress post with various sections that were associated with a number of the Tweets I’d make. I used good ol’ anchor links in the Tweets to be able to link specifically to those sections without having to resort lots of little posts.
For example –
http://bionicteaching.com/form-follows-function-wordpress-authoring/#custom
brings you to the Custom Composition section directly. Not very visual on the Twitter end and probably cheating in the scheme of things.
The Videos
I tried to tackle other complexity through videos. I made a number of new videos and took advantage of a few others I’d had to try to show more details. I kind of wonder if this worked well. They appeared in two different ways. Some I put in the Tweets directly and others were just in the main blog post. Views were pretty low – around 4 views per video for that time period and not much since.
The Tweets
14/20 WordPress can be a tool for building tools . . . which gets us into slightly more complex options . . . https://t.co/JXO9LEPIRZ #pressedconf18 pic.twitter.com/fHFylYXF9f
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) March 29, 2018
This is one pattern I tried, a topic statement with a link to the section of the blog post and a meme to try to get some additional interest. There doesn’t look to be significant difference between links with memes from those without.
5/20 Using screen options is one way to make life simpler. #pressedconf18 pic.twitter.com/gZJRtDLnDM
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) March 29, 2018
This tweet uses the video directly. It didn’t do much to impact views.
Data?
If I look at the fav/retweet information on each post after breaking it down by those various types I get the chart below.
It lets me know . . . probably nothing. The numbers are probably too small to really be very significant but it doesn’t seem like using the more visual aspects of Twitter made much of a difference.
Next Time
I think next time my goal would be to pull in other people. That’ll take a good bit more prep time but I’d like to see if I can draw people into the mix rather than just presenting to the people who are intentionally in the mix. I might also try to spin up some conversations that branch out rather than trying to maintain a flow of information that’s driven by me. Maybe I’ll get some Drupal people involved. Challenge some LMS fans . . . who knows?
1 Every term Twitter has spawned makes me shudder in revulsion.
Have you looked via analytics.twitter.com at the data?