Okay I realized that I have been chirping at people to get on Twitter, but I haven’t really helped people to learn more about Twitter. I was having appetizers with a few friends on Saturday and I was trying to get my point across about how awesome Twitter is. Basically I just ended up sounding like a fanatical lunatic and my friends seemed even more confused about Twitter than ever. Hopefully this post will help to end some of the confusion and get some of my friends (you know who you are) on Twitter. First watch this short video called “Twitter in Plain English”.
Now I’ll try to break down some of the Twitter lingo for you. At first I really didn’t get it at all which really frustrated me. So I decided to go to Chapters and check out some Twitter books. I didn’t want to pay to buy one, so I spent about 10 minutes scanning the books until I had a pretty good grasp on things. Here are some of the basics:
What is Twitter?
Twitter allows people to follow sources most relevant to them and access information via Twitter as it happens-from breaking world news to updates from friends. It also allows you to share real time information with your own followers.
Quick Twitter Info
Twitter has been known as a micro-blogging application because you have 140 characters to share whatever you want. You follow the people, or organizations that you’re interested in getting updates from all of their posts (tweets) show up in your homepage feed. In return, people can become your followers to see what you’re up to as well.
Glossary
Tweet: The message that someone types in Twitter.
@username: Adding the @ symbol before someone’s screen name lets you make sure that whatever you are writing ends up on the person’s page. When it’s at the beginning of the sentence it’s a public reply to someone.
ReTweet (RT): This is how you forward or share someone else’s message with your followers. Just add RT to the beginning of the message that you want to pass along.
Direct Message (DM): You can send a private message to someone you follow this way. This keeps the message out of your public feed, but it’s still limited to 140 characters.
Hashtag (#): Hashtags help you categorize things on Twitter like companies, conferences, discussion topics, TV shows etc. This makes it easier to for users to search tweets that have a common topic. Hashtags also help create groups of people who have the same interests.
Example: I’m loving the speakers at the #TrueIdentity conference!
Trending Topics: The most popular things that people are tweeting about will appear on the right side of the screen. They’re also on the bottom of the Twitter homepage.
Tweetup: This is an in person meeting or gathering of people who are connected on twitter.
Other technology for Twittering:
URL shorteners: If you want to send a website link of a link to your blog there are several services that shrink a long URL into a much shorter obne so you don’t have to use as many of the 140 characters.
Examples:
Some of these programs will let you directly post to Twitter as well as track how many people click on the link.
Third Party Programs: There are many third party applications that help you manage Twitter more effectively. Some allow you to organize tweets, automate tweets, shorten URL’s and integrate with other social media tools and mobile devices.
Examples:
- Tweetie for Mac (www.atebits.com)
- TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com)
- Twitteriffic (www.twitterrific.com)
- Twitpic: (www.twitpic.com)
- Twitterfeed (www.twitterfeed.com)
- iPhone/Blackberry Apps: UberTwitter, Twitter for iPhone
So hopefully this helps clarify things a bit for y’all. Please post any questions, comments or suggestions that you have and I will do my best to respond. I suggest that you all go to www.twitter.com and sign up today! Start playing around and you’ll get used to it in no time.
