Hello, my name is Jayne Corso and I am a Community Manager for the American Evaluation Association (AEA). As the voice behind AEA’s Twitter presence (@aeaweb), I am always looking for new ways to connect with evaluators and surface online conversations focused on evaluation. I recently came across a tool called Riffle that is instrumental in helping to identify twitter users who are interested in evaluation and trending topics.
Riffle turns your browser into a pop-up informative Twitter analytics platform and allows you to quickly research users and read up on their Twitter habits. When you download Riffle (it’s probably easiest to add as a Google Chrome browser extension), a small triangular icon will appear on the right side of your browser. When you click this icon, Riffle will open up a sidebar that will allow you to search individual Twitter users. For example, if you search @aeaweb in Riffle, here’s what you’ll see:
When you’re looking at your home feed on Twitter, you’ll notice the Riffle icon now appears next to each Twitter user’s handle. Simply click that icon and the sidebar will pull up their Riffle information.
Rad Resource: Expand your Twitter community
If you type a user name into the search bar, such as @aeaweb, you can easily see who AEA is mentioning in posts. As you can see, AEA often mentions @clysy (Chris Lysy), @evalu8r (Stephanie Evergreen), and @bettereval (Better Evaluation). All of these users are highly focused on evaluation best practices and are folks that we’d recommend you follow! Take Riffle one step further and search one of the usernames in AEA top mentions to find out who they follow.
Rad Resource: Uncover new trends
Similar to top mentions, the tool also returns the top hashtags used in Tweets by the Twitter user you search. Let’s look at another example, when you search for @evalu8r in Riffle, you can see that Stephanie Evergreen commonly uses these hashtags: #dataviz #eval #p2i #eval14. You’ve just found four evaluation focused hashtags that you can begin following on Twitter, opening the door to some great new content and information that you may have been missing in the past. You’ll find it easier to stay up-to-date on new trends in evaluation through reading these hashtags and participate in online conversations by using the hashtags in your own tweets.
Hot Tip: Get ready for Evaluation 2014
If you are joining us at Evaluation 2014, keep an eye on the #eval14 hashtag for the most up-to-date information about the event. Also use the hashtag in your Tweets to share your experiences, conference photos, or to connect with other attendees. We look forward to seeing you in Denver!
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
This tool is neat. Thanks for sharing.
Be sure to search “riffle twitter” to find this tool via google. There is another application called ‘riffle’ that appears to be for books, and the riffle for twitter application does not show up in the first page of search.