Realizing the importance of their service to journalists, Twitter developers have produced an extensive Twitter for Newsrooms page. The site has details on reporting tips, ways to engage with your audience, tools for publishing, and information about Internet security (i.e. what to do if someone hacks your Twitter account).
Twitter can be a terrific source of sources: people and organizations worth following. What they tweet can keep you up-to-date and might spark story ideas. In addition, you can use Twitter to ask your followers for information, advice, story ideas and questions they’d like answered when you interview a key news maker. In that way, some journalists use their Twitter followers as an informal sounding board. For more on the mechanics, Twitter has a detailed Help page with links by topic.
Here are other tips and sites to help tame Twitter:
Whom to follow? – Think of your main stream in Twitter as your own Twitter channel. Once you follow someone, their tweets enter your feed. Prune out noisy people who offer little in the way of useful information, links or advice. Be selective about whom you follow. Otherwise, important information may get buried in a tsunami of worthless tweets. One way to find helpful people to follow is by looking at some of your key sources: Whom do they follow? Feel free to poach from them.
Listorious – This site helps you find people by key topics and categories. A search for “national security” pulls up Twitter accounts you might consider following, along with curated lists (more on that next) and related tags. The screenshot on the right shows a few of the top results.
Twitter lists – A list is a channel you create on Twitter so that you can tune in to certain people without having them clog your main tweet stream. Assigning someone to a Twitter list is different from following them. You can assign someone to a list without following them; that way, their updates do not clog your main news feed. When you’re interested in reading tweets on that topic, simply click on the list to see what people you’ve assigned to the list have been posting. Full details and how-to instructions are on Twitter’s help page for Lists.
You can create your own lists, much as you can create groups on Facebook and circles on Google+. Lists show up on your Twitter profile page. So, you might create a list of key national security sources. That way, you can see what they’re tweeting when you click on the list, but their tweets will not enter your main feed (because you are not “following” them on Twitter).
When you set up a list, you have the option of making it public or private. A public list shows up on your profile page, and other people can subscribe to that list. 
When people are added to public lists, they are notified. Or, you can create a private list, if you want to monitor certain people or offices without letting them know you’re watching. A private list is visible only to you on your profile page; people are not notified when they’re added to a private Twitter list. Subscribing to someone else’s list can save time – no need to reinvent a list that already exists. For example, you might want to follow this Twitter list of National Security Experts curated by James Davis. You also can use Listorious to search for lists by key word(s). Click on “Lists” instead of “People” under the search screen (see above, left).
Advanced Twitter Search – With this tool, you can search for sources and tweets using key words. But the most helpful filter, by far, is location. This sets the Advanced Twitter Search apart from other tools. Type a city or ZIP code into the “Near this place” box. Then, you can specify the distance from that location that you’d like to search for tweets. If you want to find local sources tweeting about a key topic in your news coverage area, this tool can help find them.
Hash tags – Tap into what people are tweeting about a particular topic by searching key hash tags. Any word in a tweet that has a # in front of it becomes instantly searchable. Examples include #military, #milfam (military families), #DADT (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell), #Guantanamo and #milhealth (military health issues). By searching a hash tag, you can tune into what hundreds or thousands of people are tweeting about that topic without having to follow all of them or add them to a list.
Older tweets – Many search engines can find tweets dating back only about 10 days. For older tweets, try a couple other options:
- Snapbird can search back several years, depending on how active the person has been on Twitter, and allows filtering by key words. So, you could search a congressman’s Twitter account to see what he has tweeted on key topics.
- If you need to download someone’s tweets over time, try All My Tweets. This service pulls up to 3,200 tweets from any public Twitter account, enabling a quick copy-and-paste into a Word document or Excel spreadsheet for review.
Results for @thejointstaff search
@ references – The @ symbol has special powers on Twitter. When you start a tweet with the @ symbol (followed by a user handle), that tweet does not go out to everyone who follows you on Twitter. It goes into the other person’s @ box – think of it as a public “in box” when you want to tweet “at” a specific person. The tweet also goes into the news feeds of anyone who follows you and the other person on Twitter. So, a tweet that begins with the @ symbol has a limited audience. Many people mistakenly think that @ messages on Twitter are private. If you reply to someone on Twitter or start a tweet with the @ symbol, the tweet lands in that person’s @ box. However, those tweets are fully searchable. Sometimes it’s interesting to do a search on someone’s Twitter handle (e.g. @thejointstaff for the Joint Staff) to see what people are saying directly to them or about them in tweets. In that way, you can eavesdrop on Twitter conversations. By the way, if you mention a Twitter user with the @ symbol someplace in the body of your tweet, it goes out to all of your followers. Those types of tweets also are fully searchable. Here are two examples of tweets to clarify:
- “@thejointstaff When can I schedule my interview with Admiral Mullen?” – This tweet goes to @thejointstaff and anyone who follows you and @thejointstaff.
- “Hard to believe how long it takes to get a response from @thejointstaff.” – This tweet goes out to all of your followers, plus ends up in the @ box for @thejointstaff (flagging it to their attention).
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