In her book Passionate Learners: How to Engage and Empower Your Students, Pernille Ripp provides some valuable advice for getting involved in Twitter. She recommends starting small and making quality connections with those you follow. That means having some criteria for what you are looking for in your Twitter feed.

I am putting together some resources for my ed tech project management class this semester and wanted to recommend some good Twitter accounts that could help them connect with and learn from the active online project management community. I started with a list from 2014. Tim Walker, who curated the original list, listed his criteria in making the selections. He was looking for relevant information, conversational quality, steady activity and plenty of followers (at least 2000). These criteria make a good starting point for curating a Twitter list and I’d recommend reading through Tim’s introduction to his list.

I’d add one more criteria that comes to mind after spending the past hour checking out the 14 folks on Tim’s list: I’m looking for evidence of a personal touch. One of the accounts posted a link to an automated daily digest and the few I looked at didn’t seem specifically related to project management. Another account was mostly retweets without providing any comments or conversation. Finally, at least a couple accounts seemed to mostly advertise upcoming workshops and meetups, and while these might be of interest to active project managers, I didn’t think they were right for my students. I skipped adding all of the above to my own list.

I don’t want to have to weed through a dump of your content to find useful resources. And, if you retweet a link, I would like to know that you reviewed the material rather than just working through your Twitter feed and retweeting stuff from others. A quick comment or observation can provide some context and help me decide if it’s a resource or article worth pursuing. Quality over quantity is the theme here, an important point for all of us to consider in our social media lives.

For what it’s worth, here are the five Twitter accounts I chose to share with my students. I’m going to add Holly Davis as she is fun and has an interesting way of including a pertinent quote in her links and Natalie Semczuk because she shared this fabulous collection of project management gifs. I can’t wait to share these with my students.