CMS 4610: Twitter Posts

By the second week of the semester, create a Twitter account if you do not already have one. Your name must be included on the account’s profile page. (If for some reason you do not want to use your real name, let me know and I will give you a pseudonym.)

If you want to use your existing account, make sure that it is set to public. (It must stay public for the full semester).

If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, the following pages will help get you started.

Getting Started

Twitter offers a Help Center that includes detailed information on tweeting and managing your account.

To help get  you started, the Center’s managing your account section offers detailed information on logins, passwords, usernames, etc.

In addition, the following pages cover the basics of crafting and sending tweets.

Trouble Shooting

If you carefully follow all the directions below, but your  post doesn’t immediately show up in the results from a #cms4610 search, don’t panic, and don’t re-post multiple times.

Twitter is wary of fake accounts created to push spam, so posts from new accounts aren’t always included immediately in search results. And if you publish an identical post more than once, Twitter will be even more likely to conclude that yours is a spam account.

Instead,  if you don’t see your correctly formatted post in the #cms4610 search results, let me know this via email and include a link to your Twitter post in the message.

Assignment Directions

The due dates for your assignment can be found in Georgia View, in the Announcements tool.

By the end of each week assigned to you, use your account to complete the following assignment.

  1. Find a recent news story about social media that has not already been posted by another student in the class. The story must have been published in a major international news paper, or in one of four national newspapers. (See below for examples.) The article must have appeared between August 1, 2018, and July 31, 2019.
  2. Tweet a link to the story from your Twitter account.
  3. Include in the tweet a explicit reference to our assignment materials as well as a concrete explanation of the story’s relevance to our class
  4. Important: Include the #cms4610 hash tag in your tweet.

Remember that Step 3 in the list above is crucial, and it’s also hard: doing everything else and linking your story to our class material—all in 280 characters or less—will take some careful writing and editing. The clearer the link, the better your grade for this assignment. The image below demonstrates the kind of explicit link that I am expecting.

Sample tweet that links a news story to our class material.
Sample tweet that links a news story to our class material.

Major National Newspapers

To earn full points on this assignment, your article must appear in the web site of a major national newspaper. In the United States, four newspapers qualify:

Many important international newspapers are published in English, and they also would be excellent choices for this assignment. Among many others, these include

Scoring

Your post(s) will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

  1. Presentation: Did your spoken report clearly summarize the article and convincingly link it to a particular reading and/or class topic?
  2. Timeliness: Did the post appear during the assigned week?
  3. Appropriate Story: Was the chosen story published by a national newspaper during the assigned time frame? Has it already been posted by another student?
  4. Account Name: Is the Twitter account name either the student’s actual name or the  pseudonym assigned to the student by the instructor?
  5. Explanation: Does the post include a concrete explanation of the story’s relevance to our class? Does it refer to assigned readings? (This is the hardest criterion to complete. See example above.)
  6. Hash tag: Does the post include the #cms4610 hash tag?