As well as our Social Networking groups on Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, FirstSigns is also on Twitter.

Those of you already following us will know that all FirstSigns news and information is announced on Twitter first. It’s a simple and efficient way for us to interract with our members.

If you don’t have a Twitter account, it’s easy to set up and you can follow @FirstSigns straight away. Once you’re following us you can send replies to our Tweets either publicly, or via a direct message (private) – and with all messages limited to just 140 characters it only takes a few second. Twitter really is a great way to keep in touch, update your ‘status’ and of course you can ‘follow’ all your friends who have Twitter accounts too!

It’s also easy to feed your twitter updates into your other social networking profiles, so you can update your Facebook profile, for example, direct from Twitter.

FirstSigns is currently being nominated for a Twitter Shorty Award in the nonprofits catagory, so thank you to everyone who has nominated us. Unfortunately nominations are currently taking a while to register on the site (we know we’ve had more than are showing), so if yours hasn’t shown up yet then maybe try again :)

The closing date for nominations is midnight on 31 December, so if you haven’t yet nominated @FirstSigns please consider doing so. We’re unlikely to get the number of votes larger organisations are pulling in, but every vote we get puts us further up the leader board and so helps to spread awareness about FirstSigns and self-injury.

If anyone needs help in setting up a Twitter account or following @Firstsigns, please either leave a comment here or email Jules@firstsigns.org.uk

Finally, we hope you all had a safe and happy Xmas. We’ll be blogging tomorrow about the New Year, with ideas on how to make it a happy and empowering 2009. Of course, a link to the post will be Twittered as soon as it’s published!