How to Tweet – Basic tips on how to get the most from Twitter
Posted on 26. Sep, 2009 by benmckenna in All Posts, Twitter
I’ve blogged a few times before on some of the wonderful, versatile things Twitter can be used for and happily I’ve had some rather pleasant feedback from people saying I’ve opened their eyes to one or two things about it. One thing that still interests me though, is that people are still using Twitter as just a communication tool and that communication is tending in some cases to be of a very narrow – person to person – style. The real power of Twitter is it’s possibility for much broader communication and generally the barrier to that seems to be not understanding the full breadth of functionalities of the Twitter platform.
With this post what I am specifically looking to do is illustrate the breadth of Twitter so to do that I’m going to briefly run down every absolutely essential core function of Twitter detailing why you should use them, that is if you aren’t already.
@s
OK, this one is basic and fairly simple, @s are the cornerstone of Twitter to the point where they appear in everyone’s user names. They are however massively important as prefacing a user name with an at constitutes a “mention”, these are then automatically picked up in the @yourusername section of that user’s profile (or client) and this lets them know that they are being talked about.
DMs
One of the slightly disconcerting things about Twitter for the newer user is the fact that everything is public, sometimes things just need to be kept private though and, dull as they are, Direct Messages (DMs) are therefore very useful for this. DMs are great for passing users more private messages like meeting times/places, email addresses or mobile numbers.
RTs
Retweets are the lifeblood of Twitter and allow tweets to have a truly viral reach. That is, they allow messages to be rebroadcast to more and more followers. I follow a lot of people who have a lot of very interesting things to say and, knowing that people who follow me would find these things interesting, Retweeting messages to my followers is a great way to share the love. Also, Retweeting is a great way to get more followers as people will identify you as a sharer of useful information and will be more inclined to follow you because of it.
Retweetrank is a useful website where you can see who Retweets what and how often a user RTs content.
#hashtags
Hashtags are also pretty important to Twitter’s functionality. When common topics are being discussed they are usually identified by gaining their own hashtag and this in turn makes the hastag identifyable in Twitter’s “Trending topics” section. When breaking news happens nowadays you can usually see it first there. Hashtags are also great for memes and pun games, a recent favourite of mine being #cheesefilms.
The #Hashtags site is a useful site to see how hashtagging in more detail.
Twitter Clients
So that’s all of Twitter’s functionalities covered but there’s one other vital part of Twitter that’s vital to use in order to get the most from it. Twitter Clients are third party applications that provide a more intuitive user interface for your twitter accounts. Popular desktop clients are Tweetdeck, Destroy Twitter, Twhirl and Seesmic.
Generally they sort functions like your mentions (@yourusername) and DMs into columns alongside tweets from your friends. Clients also do handy things like provide automatic URL shortening – especially handy for posting long urls in tweets whcih have a maximum character count of 140 – and, perhaps most handily of all, automatically upload your photos to Twitter photo sharing services like Mobypicture, Twitpic or Yfrog.
In some, such as Tweetdeck, you can also separate tweets from users into different groups, run real time searches on hashtags and other keywords.
So, with a basic understanding of all of these you should have enough to get yourself set up on, and well into, Twitter. As per usual, if I have missed anything out or you think I have got anything spectacularly wrong then please drop me a comment below.