Twitter is an amazing learning space. It allows anyone to share 140 characters with the world with just a few clicks. Thousands of educators are on Twitter today learning, sharing, and collaborating. I hope you are one of them! With all of this sharing comes some junk. This post will outline things that I watch out for on Twitter to help to be safer and learn more!

  • Users who do not have profile information - I have always had a policy to only follow educators. I don't see much sense in just following someone to follow them. I wanted to use twitter to learn! If someone new follows me, I always read their profile and some tweets before I follow them back. If you are someone who does not have profile information, I am likely not to follow you back. Share who you are and what your passions are in life!
  • Users without a profile picture - The good old Egg! To me, this shows that you are not interested in Twitter, that you do not care to share who you are and what you do. With that being said, I do follow people who choose not to have their picture on for security purposes. In those cases, they have profile information, and their tweets are relevant to me.

  • Messages saying “questionable” things - NEVER, NEVER, NEVER click on these links. They are SPAM!!! They will hack your account, DM all your followers a similar message, and basically put egg all over your face. Ignore these messages by not clicking on the link, you can read them, but never click on them. 




  • Tweets saying the same thing - Bots on twitter often send the same message to multiple people. Sometimes they tweet once a day, sometimes it is every 10 seconds. Before you follow or click on a link, make sure the user profile does not look like this.


  • Users who have huge follow lists, but few followers - This is the least worry some issue. I follow many people who have similar lists but be cautious. Sometimes, these people are just trolling for a follow back and will post nothing relevant on their feed. Sometimes these users are Twitter bots just trying to SPAM people.