 Hey, this is Bob Birch, Web Technology Specialist with NDSU Agriculture Communications with a few tips on building a learning network with Twitter. Once you have your Twitter account and you're all set up and ready to go, one of the things that you want to ask yourself if you're really interested in building a learning network is who do I want to learn from? Who are the authors, bloggers, colleagues, customers, magazines, news sites, professional development organizations that I want to learn from? And don't worry at this point whether those people are on Twitter or not on Twitter, just start building that list so you know who you're looking for. And at that point you can start looking for those people on Twitter and resources on Twitter and you might be surprised at how many you find. Just go to www.twitter.com, log into your Twitter account, and then type the names in the search bar to search for those people. Go ahead and we use the example here of Sarah Milstein who co-wrote the Twitter book with Tim O'Reilly. When you first do the search what you're going to get back is the tweets with Sarah or Milstein in the name. But what you'll want to do is click the people tab and you can see the red arrow pointing to the people tab and that will give you a list of Twitter accounts that show in a search results around that name. So you can see right there here that we found Sarah Milstein. She's the first one to come up and that is the Sarah Milstein we're looking for. And so if we want to follow her we just click the follow button. Similarly you need to ask yourself what do you want to learn about? Identify topics that you want in your learning network. Your academic or professional specialties, professional development needs, areas of interest, hobbies, family and friends. Geographic locations. What do you want your network to center around? And now you can take that list of topics and do the same thing we did with the people. Go to twitter.com, log in, type the topic into the search bar. When you first search you're going to get tweets back that mentioned that particular topic. And so you can see the example here is for Delta Blues. So we get some tweets back that mention the Delta Blues. We can look at those tweets and decide to follow the person who posted those tweets just by clicking on their username. Here where we have the red arrow. And when you click on their username what pops up over on the right hand side is more about their account. This is Stoney Plain Records. And if I choose to follow this record company now I can just click on the follow button and I've added them to my learning network. You can also type a topic in the search bar and instead of just focusing on the tweets click on the people tab. And take a look at accounts that have that term in their names or in their Twitter biographies or bios. And again that's another way to find people who might be sharing information about that topic. And then again click the follow button in order to add them to your learning network. Another way to build your listening network is to take the people and the accounts that you already follow and take a look at who they are following. Who's following them and what Twitter lists their accounts are listed on. So the example here is of USDA Rural Development. And you can see when we click on USDA Rural Development's account right up here we can see how many people are following them and how many lists their account appears on. And if I want to look at who they're following I just click on the number here with the blue arrow and it will take me to a list of who USDA Rural Development is following. And now I can look at this list and decide if any of these people or accounts are worth adding to my learning network and they might be. Science at USDA, WhiteHouse.gov, Farm Radio, etc. You can also take a look by clicking on the number above where it says listed here for USDA Rural Development. You can take a look at the lists that USDA Rural Development is listed on. Twitter lists can be put together by any Twitter user and you just click on that list and when you do you get a list of the other accounts who are in that list. And so now we see EPA Research here if we're interested in that we can click on that account name and decide to follow that account. By clicking the following tab up here we see all the accounts. There's a couple senators, Michael Bloomberg, maybe some other folks that we want to follow. We can just do that by clicking the follow button. So who do you want to follow? What do you want your learning network to center around? Don't forget to see who other people are following and what lists they appear on as a way of building your Twitter network.