Hope for Afghan Children is now tweeting using the name afghankids. We’ll use Twitter to update you about this site, about events at the AFCECO orphanages and news from Afghanistan.
We’ll also be using Twitter to follow other organizations providing information about Afghanistan or doing good work for Afghan people, such as Vets for Afghanistan (vets4afstan).
If you’re not familiar with using Twitter or not sure how to make it useful for you, one of the best ways to improve the signal-to-noise ratio is to use Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is a program which lets you follow different conversation streams on Twitter with ease. Using Tweetdeck, it’s easy, for example, to focus on Afghan issues and tune out other stuff.
To use Tweetdeck:
- Create a Twitter account if you don’t already have one.
- Download and install Tweetdeck. It requires Adobe Air to run, which will be installed automatically.
- Launch Tweetdeck, go through the setup procedure, and then click the Twitter Search icon (the magnifying glass) near the top left.
- Type a search phrase such as afghan OR afghanistan and press Enter. Or you might try #afghan OR afghankids OR afceco. Note that many people use the #afghan tag to mark tweets that pertain to Afghanistan. Using “OR” in your search phrases expands the scope of your search. So, for example a search for afghankids afceco will find only those tweets that refer to both afghankids and afceco; a search for afghankids OR afceco finds tweets that refer to either afghankids or to afceco or to both.
- Tweetdeck will display a new column displaying tweets that match your search phrase. Now you can easily track tweets that are relevant.
If you’d prefer to handpick a specific group of twitterers to focus on, use Tweetdeck’s Group search (it’s the icon displaying two people). You’ll see a list of all the people you’re following on Twitter and you can select those you’d like to focus on.