How can academics use Twitter effectively?

I have been using Twitter for a few years now, but it has been a while since I blogged on this topic.

When I started tweeting I know that I would not be able to tweet every day, and weeks (or even months) could go by without me tweeting, and, to me, that would not give a very good impression.

Before I signed up I looked at how I could tweet automatically. You quickly come across services such a Hootsuite, which enable you to schedule tweets. This is a very nice service but you still have to do something on a regular basis. Like before, it is easy to forget, not have time etc. and you suddenly find yourself tweetless for weeks (or months).

That was the main reason I developed my own Twitter application. This enables me to do one tweet a day. This means that I am tweeting regularly and I hope that it is supplemented by a liberal smattering of ‘live’ tweets, as well as retweets.

I have automated two types of tweets.

1. I have a list of my publications, held as bibtex, and I tweet those.
2. I have another database, which holds (I hope) items of interest – let’s call them News.

Each day (it could be set up to do more), I choose (randomly) whether to tweet a News item, or a paper. Once that decision has been made, I just choose randomly from the relevant database/bibtex file.

But, this set me thinking. What would academics actually want from a Twitter service? I am specifically thinking about sending tweets, but I would also be happy to hear about reading them.

If you have any views, I would be really interested to know (as I might do it!).

Please just add a comment which specifies your ‘Tweeting wish list’, from your academic perspective.