Day 5 of #YSJ10DoT: Tweeting Media and Polls

We started tweeting on day 2 and covered how to include URLs to other websites in tweets. Including signposts to other content is one way of making your tweets more attractive and engaging – adding media (video, images, gifs) is another. Twitter’s own analysis of two million Tweets sent by thousands of users over one month confirmed that adding video, links and photos all boost the number of ‘Retweets’ you receive, i.e. the number of people who re-post your tweet to their followers:

• • Photos average a 35% boost in Retweets
  • Videos get a 28% boost
  • Hashtags (Day 7) receive a 16% boost

Twitter now supports the use of animated GIFs in Tweets. These are short animations or videos that will play on repeat alongside your tweet. You might include a GIF in your tweet to stress your point or let others know your thinking on something in a quick, humorous way. You can find GIFs on sites like Giphy, or you can make your own. Twitter also has an inbuilt GIF library to choose from.

This video shows you how you can use a GIF in a tweet.

Twitter polls

Twitter Polls allow you to weigh in on questions posed by other people on Twitter. You can also easily create your own poll and see the results instantly.

You can create your own Twitter Poll on the web or in the Twitter app (iOS or Android).

This video shows you how to create a Twitter poll.

Adding video to your tweets

You may want to share a useful video you’ve found on YouTube, Vimeo, TED or TED-Ed – perhaps of a presentation or talk, or public engagement. You could also share something you’ve uploaded yourself – Media Library lecture recordings, for example. If the video is already on the web somewhere, you should check to see if there is a Share to Twitter button or icon alongside the video. If so, just select that and it will take you to a new tweet box (you might be prompted to log in first) with the URL to that video already in the tweet. If there is no Share to Twitter icon alongside the video, simply copy the URL to the webpage and paste it into your tweet, as we did in Day 2.

If you want to create a new video and upload it to Twitter, you can do this using the Twitter for iOS or Twitter

for Android mobile apps. You can also create a live video on Twitter.

Activity!

Suzy (@SuzyYSJ)

Further reading:

• Twitter: Posting photos on Twitter
• Twitter: Report sensitive media
• Twitter: Media settings and best practices
• Twitter: How to share and watch videos on Twitter
• Twitter: Create a live video

Ten Days of Twitter for Learning Developers was originally adapted from a similar programme for STEM researchers, also created by Helen Webster. The materials are available under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA.

Ten Days of Twitter has been adapted by Technology Enhanced Learning for use at YSJ, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License.