Annyce Davis

Davis Technology Consulting

Tackling Twitter

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So one thing people ask me a lot is: “How do I use Twitter?” What they’re really trying to find out is “How to use Twitter to stay in the know and promote themselves on the Internet.” This is a great question. A few months ago I asked myself the same question and ended up reading countless blogs and a few books on the subject of self promotion. Thus I’ve decided to expound on my current strategy for Tackling Twitter in this post. So keep reading…

The Basics

What is Twitter? It’s a social network that lets you find out what’s going on in your area and around the world in topics that you care about. It’s based on short messages called “tweets” that are currently limited to 140 characters. The tweets are presented in reverse chronological order, for the most part. Below is a snapshot of my Twitter home page. It contains your primary timeline with tweets from all the people you follow, basic analytics, popular hashtags, and more!

Twitter Homepage

With the “what” covered, let’s discuss the “why”. Why should you as a developer care about your presence on Twitter? In a word: networking. To expand on that, I’d say that Twitter is the best way to meet people who are interested in and actively involved in the tech community. I personally have established virtual relationships with hundreds of people in the Android community. This has enabled me to get answers to my development questions, receive encouragement to tackle new coding challenges, as well as expand my career. It’s also a way that I can give back to the community by doing the same for others.

So maybe you want to see some more tangible benefits. Here’s a listing of several opportunities I’ve directly had through interactions on Twitter:

  • Invited to connect with O’Reilly for a video course deal
  • Invited to speak at conferences
  • Invited to speak at meetups
  • Invited to do podcast interviews
  • Invited to write a guest blog post
 
And there are probably more things that I just can’t recall at the moment. So yes, very useful for expanding your career!

#Hashtags

So one of the major things that you need to understand about Twitter is its use of hashtags. Hashtags are essentially just a way to label tweets. With all of the content that is produced on Twitter every second it would be impossible to find what you’re interested in without them.


You can use hashtags in various ways:

  • To search for additional tweets
  • Find new accounts to follow
  • Participate in Twitter chats
  • Follow along with live events


Twitter Hashtag

Filtering Content

Once you start following a couple hundred people you will notice that your homepage is just a random mix of information. So in order to read specific tweets on a given subject I tend to create Twitter lists for myself to help with organizing the content. Below is a screenshot of some of the Twitter lists that I belong to.

Twitter List

Creating a Twitter list is very simple (see gif below). You have the option to make your list public or private. If your list is public then others can see your list and follow it if they desire, also when you add people they will be notified that you have added them. However, if you create a private list then it’s just for you. 


I like to use private lists for when there’s a specific group of people that I want to follow what they tweet closely. So maybe you really want to speak at a conference, why not create a private list of the conference organizers. Then you can begin your campaign to become “known” to them and increase your chances of having an opportunity to speak.

Adding Someone to Your List

Establishing “Relationships”

Ok, so up until this point, you’re mostly just consuming content. Now let’s discuss how you can evolve your interactions on Twitter by establishing “relationships” with others. No one wants to be seen as a walking billboard, just constantly spewing information. By interacting with the people on your list, by doing things like favoriting tweets or retweeting, you get the attention of those in your “Twitterverse”. Over time they will begin to recognize you and may return a similar level of interaction with your tweets. So like many things in life, it just takes time and don’t get discouraged if you don’t start to see immediate results from your efforts on Twitter.

Crafting Your Tweets

Another thing people often lament to me is that they don’t know what to tweet about. There are so many great things to tweet about! If you do anything related to your industry, like attend conferences, read articles or create your own content, you can find something tweet-worthy. 

Automation

Once you start tweeting regularly and building up a following, you may want to begin to automate some of your efforts on Twitter. I prefer to segment chunks of my day to optimize my overall output, so it’s easier for me to curate my tweets in advance. For this I use Buffer, a tool that let’s you schedule tweets. They have very useful tutorials and helpful staff if you run into issues.

Just Remember

Be nice! The Internet is full of trolls and just extremely negative people, so why contribute to that? Instead you can use your newfound Twitter prowess to spread positivity in the tech community. I can’t wait to read your tweets!
Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter where I’ll share my top 3 tweet templates. Until next time…

Write/Speak/Code 2016 Recap

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This was my first time attending Write/Speak/Code and it was an amazing experience. Not only did I learn useful information for advancing my career I delivered my first Keynote talk. I put together a few highlights of the event below:

Overview

The event took place at The Chicago School of Psychology in Chicago, Illinois. It was my second time in Chicago and I forgot how amazing the food was, so yes I ate well. The conference was split into two tracks: First-Timers and Alumna. All attendees were together for the morning/evening Keynotes and lunch. Then we split into our two tracks and attended “workshop-style” sessions in various areas surrounding writing, speaking and coding. 

Android ladies at #wsc2016conf Come say hi if you’re @WriteSpeakCode pic.twitter.com/UHuXRSYH52

— Yash Prabhu (@yashvprabhu) June 15, 2016

Attendees

The conference is open to all who identify as women. Their mission is to empower women developers to become thought leaders, conference speakers, and open source contributors. So the experience level was across the spectrum, many women were just entering the field and others were very experienced developers. So it was great getting to interact with such a diverse group of talented people.

Who came the farthest to #wsc2016conf? Woman from Alaska is the winner!! pic.twitter.com/jUOlQpI5du

— WriteSpeakCode (@WriteSpeakCode) June 15, 2016

Takeaways

So there were a few sessions that I derived a ton of value from, one was about “Ask vs. Guess Culture Communication”. This talk discussed the nuances of the different communication styles, as well as strategies for bridging the gap between the two. During the discussion phase we talked about being successful when pair programming with someone who may have a different communication style from you and I really appreciated the following suggestions:

  • Do a Pairing Retrospective
  • Include lots of “I” statements
  • Establish a baseline for why you’re pairing
  • Use a Timer ~10 minutes for the “driver”
  • Swap writing tests and code

Then during the “Project Discovery Workshop” I was blown away by the many helpful strategies provided by Annie Passanisi. For instance, when you’re working on a technical blog post and you would like feedback how should you approach it? Well, here are some of the suggestions she offered:

  • Only ask people you trust to review your work
  • Send them the request with a list of questions to answer, like:
  • Did it answer all of your questions?
  • How can I provide more value?
  • What new questions came up for you?
  • What was your favorite part?
I also really enjoyed the information shared during the “Salary Negotiation” talk. Ashley Powell showed how men and women often negotiate differently and that leads to men consistently making more money than women even though they have the same experience. So it was great to see ideas for how to negotiate when you’re job hunting as well as when you’re looking for a raise. One thing that really stuck with me was that you don’t have to be “aggressive” to negotiate, just go with what works with your personality. Whatever you do, it doesn’t hurt to just ask!

Exactly what to say when negotiating from @AshleyPQPQP, I find this so challenging to do. Great advice! #wsc2016conf pic.twitter.com/qVAHTsAi2C

— Annyce Davis (@brwngrldev) June 18, 2016


 With all the information that was being shared during the conference, I appreciated the fact that I still had time to step away and grab some ice cream with a good friend.

Taking a break from #wsc2016conf to enjoy some ice cream with @brwngrldev pic.twitter.com/88Vu1P1pmA

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) June 17, 2016


This was my first time attending an all women conference and it was just as many have said before a transformative experience. I left feeling empowered to do even more great things and to be okay with doing nothing at all. 

Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with my Speaking Adventures. Until next time…

Talk: Say It With Video!

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Every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours of video on YouTube and that number is steadily increasing. So how can you take advantage of video to help promote your personal brand and/or share your expertise? In this talk, I’ll walk you through the steps I took to develop my first video course, from outlining the initial structure down to actual video creation. Walk away with the tools you need in order to create short, informative online video content!

It covers: Preparation, Execution and Marketing Steps

Materials

 
If you would like to view some of my video content, I encourage you to check out my video course and bite-sized tutorials available on Caster.io.

Review: Talk Like TED

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If I was offered the opportunity to give a TED talk, let’s just say I wouldn’t turn up my nose at it. So I was really excited to find this book, Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds.  In it the author analyzes hundreds of the most popular TED talks and provides insights into what made them so successful. Then he goes on to share actionable advice for how anyone can give a talk that’s memorable and engaging. Some of my favorite tips were the following:

Tell a Story

Over and over again the book highlights the importance of telling a story during your talk. Now not a, “Once upon a time…” type story, but rather something short and meaningful that relates to your topic at hand. I don’t typically think of telling a story during a tech talk but I wanted to see if I could somehow use a short story in my upcoming talk at Write/Speak/Code. So here’s a slide from my talk:
 
Here’s what I was going to originally say:

“I created an online video course for O’Reilly Media with no prior experience.” 

Now that’s definitely a true statement, but it would be much more engaging if I made a short story out of it. So I added a bit more detail and now I will say something like this:

“Last August I was contacted by Meghan, an editor at O’Reilly Media and offered the opportunity to create an online video course for them. I was very hesitant about doing it since I had no prior experience.” 

Notice how both statements convey the same thought, but the second is obviously more interesting and will get the audience more involved with the talk. At least I hope 😉

The Rule of Three

“The rule of three…is a writing principle that suggests that things that come in threes are funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things.” (Wikipedia) The author shows several examples of how pervasive the Rule of Three is in our lives and culture. So it makes sense that we would want to apply this technique in our conference talks/presentations. Apparently it’s easier for our audience to remember things that are presented in groups of three. Here’s a slide from my talk on Screen Robots. Notice how in the agenda I only have three items. This is a technique that I plan to continue using as much as makes sense.


I’ve only touched briefly on two of the nine techniques in this post; but hopefully you found this review useful. I highly recommend this book for those interested in giving talks, in case you haven’t noticed!  Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter for future book recommendations.

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