Good to see some many people using Twitter!

If you are using Twitter for university work or career development you will probably find that it is who you follow rather than what you say about yourself that helps most. Here’s a round-up of Tweeters on the JPR staff and a quick reminder of how #tags work.

The most useful follow is, of course,  @jprsunderland which we use to spread course news and also to pass on – ReTweet (RT) - individual staff tweets that are relevant to most students.

Here are some staff IDs: Alex Lockwood is @alexlockwood, Philip Young @mediations, Julie Bradford @juliebradford, David Banks @DBanksy, John Price @fleashine, Alistair Robinson @typewritr , and Chris Rushton is @ChrisRushton.

Some of us also use #tags, which we put at the end of tweets. This is to help with searches – if you search for #prusnd you will find all the tweets people think maybe relevant to most Sunderland PR students. This works best if you use a slightly more sophisticated Twitter client than the basic Twitter page. Tweetdeck, for example lets you set up dedicated columns for individual search terms, so I see in real time all tweets that include #jprsunderland, #prsund etc.

Searches using #tags can be particularly useful when a breaking news story or Twitter debate develops – #trafigura was an exciting follow last week!!!

(For some reason Apples don’t have a # key – you have to type Alt and 3 at the same time).

Here is how some of the team use #tags. Don’t forget you can use them, too – if you find something useful for a particular module add the tag to your Tweet and the rest of us will see it, whether we follow you or not.

Alistair (@typewritr) uses #MAC136, #MAC188 #MAC189 #MAC373 #MAC331 #MAC322

Julie (@juliebradford) uses #MAC189, #MACM71, #MAC373 and #MAC381

David (@DBanksy) uses #MACM73, #MAC210, #MAC373, #MAC332, #MAC236, #MAC242, #McNae

Philip (@mediations) uses #prsund, #MAC163 (plus #prinfiction and #scoopfiction for projects)

There are quite a few lists of top tweeting journalists and PRs – if you have a good one, why not add it as a comment to this post? Here’s 100 PRs to follow to get you started.