Tuesday 20 March 2012

How many Twitter Accounts do you need

I was asked today, how many Twitter accounts are needed. Do we use one for personal and one for school, or do we have one account and use it for both?
Unfortunately, this isn't a simple one to answer. There are a few impacting issues and one needs to be clear on the goal and purpose of the account before this can be answered.
Personally I have three separate Twitter accounts. One I use socially with people I know outside of the educational environment. The second I set up when I became Principal of St Kevin's. It wasn't appropriate or relevant to mix the two. The social connections I have don't have an interest in seeing what the children of St Kevin's are up to and the school community I would imaging have no interest in my social and sporting endeavours. So this was fairly straight forward. Adding another "educational" twitter account needed more thought. They are both about education, but the goals of each are different. The school account was established to promote the school and what is happening in it. It is a way of bringing the parents into the school, or along on an excursion. Real time inclusion in school events and happenings. This occasionally included tweets about parenting and education in general, but they were more in the way of value adding.

The goal of my third Twitter account is to promote educational discussion in the areas of leadership and the use of technology and social media to assist in this development. While there is a slight graying of the waters here the basic intent of each is different. This is not just relevant to me as the "Twitter", but it is also relevant to the "Twittee" who would follow my tweets. No one has time to follow everyone and those that follow too many run the risk of information overload and becoming less involved in the conversation.

Having tree accounts lets me separate my Twitter interactions just like any other aspect of life. But of course, I like all Principals in our zone am new(ish) to this notion of Professional dialogue via Twitter and there may be great benefit to combining school and professional, so I would invite others to comment on this. There is no right or wrong.

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