Before I get started on this brief crash course in Twitter, it is important to talk about what Twitter is. Twitter describes itself as “a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” This is true and most people see Twitter this way. However, Twitter can be used for so much more: a revolutionary and influential platform for “microblogging,” as evidenced by the recent situation in Iran. In today’s world, you are hard pressed to find someone who has never been to a blog before; therefore, I am assuming you all know what blogging is. Twitter takes that authorship and shrinks it down to an easily transferable and digestible 140 characters. For example: I use @TeaTimeTuesday for tweeting out things about my show, interesting tea stories, and blog posts, to list a few. It is basically used for advertising and keeping my presence known on the internet. Whereas, my personal @griffinkelton account is used to get in touch with people easily and quickly, as well as things I like to share with people (such as my blog, music, videos, and breaking news). Now, let’s get started!
The Basics
As aforementioned, in the world of Twitter you have 140 characters to tweet out anything you choose. You can do this from Twitter’s website, various programs (I like TweetDeck), or from you mobile phone via text.
Twitter also integrates a “follow” system to keep up with your friends. When you follow someone, your Twitter homepage will list their Tweets in chronological order. This will be the same for people following you. Anyone can follow anyone on Twitter, so if you want you can protect your updates so that you must approve all users requesting to follow your updates.
Replies
Replying to someone in Twitter is just like replying to an email. You are tweeting out to them (these are public and different than direct messages).
Example:
Your friend tweets something out: Just joined Twitter everyone!
You tweet back as a reply: @yourfriend Hey, there! Glad to see another fellow Twitterer
As you can see, whenever you tweet out to somebody, their handle is proceeded with the [at] “@” sign. There is no space in between the “@” and their name. Also, you can mention someone in a tweet using “@theirname” without having it be a reply.
Retweets
Another popular mechanism that Twitter employs is called the retweet (RT). These are used to re-broadcast out someone’s tweet that you find interesting and see that your followers might also find interesting.
Example:
yourfriend: “A warrior does not give up what he loves, he finds the love in what he does.” -Socrates, The Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman
you: RT @yourfriend: “A warrior does not give up what he loves, he finds the love in what he does.” -Socrates, The Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman
Uhoh! You realize you can’t tweet this out because it exceeds the 140 character minimum by just one. Solution: whenever you encounter this, see if there are any extraneous punctuation marks you can take out or omit superfluous text with ellipsis “…” So, in order to actually RT this out, you would need to remove the hyphen “-” like so:
RT @yourfriend: “A warrior does not give up what he loves, he finds the love in what he does.” Socrates, The Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman
There are also various methods to RTing. One can use the approach listed above or use any of these (Source: Kevin Rose):
retweet @originalsender: original message
retweeting @originalsender: original message
Another way of doing it is to list the @originalsender after the tweet like this: (via @originalsender).
Including Links
Oftentimes, you will want to include a link in your tweet, except URL’s have a tendency to become very long. How do you fix this problem? There are many different website services out there that do this for you. I use su.pr (by StumbleUpon); however, you need an invitation code to use this service. I would recommend bit.ly. You can also use tinyURL.
Hash Tags
In your tweets, you can tag it to make it easy to catalog and search. “#” is a hash and a hash tag would look something like this: #hashtag. Hash tags can be used to tag anything you like. There are also things called Twitter days that utilize these, oftentimes seen as trending topics:
Direct Message
The direct message (DM) feature in Twitter allows you to send a private message to one individual user. Although they are still limited to 140 characters, they allow privacy which may come in handy from time to time. To perform this from your phone, your text would look something like this: “d yourfriend message.” You can only DM someone if they follow you.
Twitter Integration
One of the greatest things about Twitter is its extendability. Many services integrate to work alongside Twitter. Here are a couple:
- Facebook: automatically imports your status (except replies).
- TwitPic: picture sharing service designed for Twitter.
- Twitvid: video sharing service designed for Twitter.
- Tumblr: blogging service that can be linked to Twitter.
- Blip.fm: service that allows you to tell people what you are listening to and let them listen to it.
Congratulations
You are now prepared to enter into the Twitter world well versed in all that might be thrown your way. So go out there and demonstrate your microblogging prowess!
Interesting links:
(Thanks to AODdesign for the twitter image. Thanks to raising ebenezer for the texting image.)
After much deliberation (and waiting), I am finally enrolled in these classes for Fall 2009