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March’s edition of Total Politics carries the following piece from me about Twitter, and in particular why councillors and would-be councillors should consider using it.

The Voice has covered Twitter more than once before, but if you are one of the many people who are just have joined Twitter or are now thinking about joining it, this post should be a helpful introduction.

What is Twitter?

When a jet plane crash-landed on the Hudson River in January, one of the first – and the most striking – photographs was taken by Janis Krums. On a passing ferry at the time, he used Twitter to send a quick message and photo. It quickly spread round the world, illustrating Twitter’s power at swiftly distributing short pieces of news.

At heart, Twitter is really very simple. It’s a free blogging service which lets you make posts (tweets) that are no more than 140 characters long. It is growing massively quickly in popularity, with website traffic in the UK up by 874% in 2008 (Hitwise figures).

Twitter’s enforced brevity makes it is well suited to brief updates (“Remember – planning meeting about park development 8pm today”), friendly chit-chat (“Congrats on passing your driving test”) and flagging up snippets of news (“Found a fantastic politics blog – https://www.libdemvoice.org”).

Passing on information, having a friendly chat, sending out updates: doesn’t that sound like what is at the heart of the relationship between councillors (or would-be councillors) and their colleagues and constituents?

Sometimes 140 characters isn’t nearly enough. But think of the occasions you never quite have time to write the website story or blog post or lengthy email – or when by the time you do get to sit at your computer the moment has past. Tweets often fit the bill nicely, particularly as Twitter is designed to be very easy to update from your mobile phone. So anywhere you have a basic signal – and a battery that isn’t flat – you can update.

To read other people’s updates you can either access the Twitter website, or install one of a range of free programs to your computer or phone. (In some countries, principally the US, you can receive other people’s updates by text, but this is no longer available in the UK.) For the more technically savvy, someone’s Twitter updates are also available as an RSS feed; for example, your local party website could display an automatically updated list of your latest tweets.

Twitter can also integrate with Facebook; indeed, for some people their Twitter use is really just a way to update Facebook. Once installed, Facebook’s Twitter application lets you have your Facebook status automatically updated each time you tweet. So one text message updates your presence in both places.

Getting started on Twitter

Convinced?