What’s The Point?
You have random thoughts. You talk to yourself sometimes, too. That’s where it started for me. Over time you build up a list of people that you follow and who are following you, and perhaps you say things that they would appreciate as well – funny anecdotes, inside jokes, news articles, etc.
The catch is that you only get 140 characters per message (tweet).
Twitter is not Facebook. You can link them together, but I don’t like that. They are different worlds that serve different purposes.
Following
These are the people who’s random thoughts and stuff (tweets) you want to see. The beauty is that you can follow and unfollow at any time. The person will get an email when you follow them, but they don’t get any notice when you unfollow them.
Followers
You can reciprocate someone following you, or you can follow someone who is of interest to you. For example, maybe you are into Miley Cyrus or Taylor Swift. I wouldn’t recommend John Mayer - he is an over tweeter.
You can get news and weather as well. If you decide someone is too chirpy just stop following them.
Creepers
People you don’t know will follow you. The default on Twitter is that your tweets are open to the world. You can configure your account to be private, though.
Twitter is one of the new frontiers of internet marketing. Everyone is trying to figure out how to make (more) money with Twitter. The exception is Twitter itself. Nobody knows how Twitter makes money. It’s one of the great mysteries of life.
The way it works is people search for keywords, and then follow whoever says those keywords. It kind of bugs me, so I go through and Block people I don’t know who aren’t associated with things that I generally tweet about.
Advanced Tweeting
In addition to just saying random stuff there are a few other things you can do. You can reply to a tweet, you can talk about specific people, and you can send a “direct message” to someone who is following you.
Let’s say you’re having lunch with some friends who are also on Twitter. You could say:
“Lunching with @person1, @person2, and @person3 at @AwesomeEatery.”
Yes, companies are also on Twitter. See how I did that?
You’ll also see conversations between people if you are following both of them. Let’s say you are following @person1 and @person2. @person1 says something that @person2 replies to. You see the original post and the response. If @person3 also replies, but you don’t follow that person you don’t get that one.
Direct messages are like wee short emails. You can do them through the website or by starting the message with the letted d and the person’s twitter screenname. Like this:
“d @person1 Hai - this is a direct message!”
Retweeting
If someone says something spectacularly brilliant that you want to pass along to all of your followers, you retweet it. That would look like this:
“RT @BrilliantPerson: It’s hot outside.”
You’ll see this in a few different forms. There are no real rules or styleguide on Twitter. The “RT” abbreviation says retweet, and you include the handle of the person you are quoting.
Overheard
Another tweet abbreviation you may see is “OH” – overheard. If you’re out and about and you overhear something ridiculous then you would tweet it:
“OH: Huh. That car has antlers.”
Hash Tags
You may see “#something” at the end of a tweet. This is a hash tag. It’s sort of like a category (or tag) applied to the message. There can be multiple tags given to a message. I don’t do this a lot, so I don’t really know what the point is.
Account Settings
Log into your account on the website and you can post your brilliant tweets. But that’s not all you can do. You can also control how you look to other people and how your twitter interacts with you.
Account Tab
This is where you can describe yourself. The name will appear with you mouse over (hover) the user name. The Location, URL, and bio will appear on your user page (twitter.com/you).
This is also where you can check a box to make your updates private if you don’t want people creeping on you.
Devices Tab
You can receive messages to your phone. Twitter started as an SMS service after-all. I haven’t really messed with this.
Picture
You get a lame default picture (avatar) when you create your account. You’re not lame, though, are you? The picture can be anything. Maybe start with a close-up of part of your face. Just change it to something.
Design
You can change the look of your user page (twitter.com/you) on the design tab. You can mess around with the background image, colors, and lots of other stuff.
The End
There’s probably a lot more that I am leaving out. These are the highlights that I could think of off the top of my head.
\@barrettclark