Recently I have been posting more opinionated, informal articles and getting nowhere. The following is merely a 15 step guide to Twitter to help people out when they get started. Hopefully someone will find this helpful!
1. Let’s go! Visit www.twitter.com and click on the ‘Get Started – Join!’ button and let us begin. Enter a username, password and email address, then click ‘I accept’ and then, ‘create my account’.
2. Friends? Twitter will now ask you to invite your friends, if you have any! These will be imported from one of the supported services: Googlemail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or MSN.
3. You’re in. Let’s sort out your stuff out. On your Twitter home page, click the link that says ‘settings’. Pan down the page and enter your full name in the appropriate place and check all the other fields are in order. You can also enter your website here which will be visible on your profile. Don’t check ‘protect my updates’ as this will limit the amount of people seeing your tweets as only those whom you approve will see them!
4. What do you look like? Click ‘settings’ and then also click the subheading, picture. You’re picture can be anything from your ugly mug to a cartoon, but try to get something noticeable, you’ll be amazed how many people will click a picture that provokes interest.
5. Give a dog a phone! Twitter is great if you’re on your phone. Once more enter the world of ‘settings’ except this time click on the ‘mobile’ tab. On your phone, add a contact called Twitter and save the number 86444. Now text the word START to this number, and you should receive a confirmation that it is set up – now you can tweet everywhere! (note: Twitter does not charge for this service. It's just like sending and receiving text messages with your friends — your carrier's standard messaging rates apply.)
6. Follow some Fellows. Go to the ‘find people’ tab in the top right of the page. Here search for people you know, friends, family, celebrities, companies, whoever you think is on Twitter. You can search for them using their first name, last name, or Twitter username. You can also do a much more advanced search i.e. by location – its not necessary though! If you want to, you can now ‘follow’ the twitterers who appear on your search results. Now you can see what they tweet on your homepage!
7. Time to tweet! Think of your home page as a room full of people, it’s a conversation. When you want to say something, write it in the box at the top saying “What’s happening?” When you’ve written it, all the people who follow you will read what you have written. That’s a tweet!
8. Replies. If you want to reply or direct to your tweets to one person in particular but want everyone to see what you’ve said add a little @ symbol before their Twitter name and then say what you want.
Eg: “@rustyrockets you’re new DVD is very much overrated!”
Those twitterers not following you or rustyrockets (Russel Brand) will not see what’s been said, but everyone else will. Using the @ symbol you can also reference people to get their attention.
Eg: “I’m going to grab lunch at Pizza Express with @wossie and @ladygaga”
This would attract the attention of those mentioned and anyone referenced. Referenced accounts are also clickable links so anyone who sees the name mentioned are able to click it and find their way to the page, thus being able to choose to follow them as well – Genius!
9. Lets get direct! Twitter also offers direct messaging. This can be done by clicking the “direct message” tab on the side of the profile of whoever it is you want to message. Alternatively, you can write “d” and then the name of the twitterer to send a private message to their twitter inbox on their homepage. Direct messages are private and can only be seen by the users that are involved.
10. Hash can be good for you! Hash keys (#) are like forums or questions. If you create a hash key comment, everyone who enters the same hash key will have their tweet shown collectively. Then, when someone clicks the hashkey, all results talking about the content will be visible on one page. These are known as trending topics, and the ones with the biggest following are shown at the side of your home page.
Eg: “#favouriteboysname” is David from one person would show up on the same page as “#favouriteboysname is Michael”.
11. Tweet twice as much! Now you’re familiar with what’s really going on, start tweeting properly. The first thing to remember is that you can’t write anything longer than 140 characters. This might not seem like many, but it’s more than enough! Be brief, be snappy, be clever.
12. What to Tweet? Content is arguably the most important thing to master. There are certain tweety traditions that you’ll notice the more you use Twitter. The language is a blend of proper English and informalities. I think Twitter itself has its own jargon of sorts. Try to get someone’s attention through a funny line, interesting quote, or shocking yet inoffensive tag line. Remember that each tweet is a self-branding tool; so think about how you want to be perceived. Also – Be Careful. Don’t say “going to the shops quickly, kids alone in the house asleep on sofa so won’t be longer than an hour.” Mind you- probably shouldn’t be doing that anyway.
13. Retweets! This is what you want. A retweet is when something you say is enjoyed so much by one of your followers that they decide to pass the information on to their followers using a retweet. This means that what you’ve said reaches everyone who can see your profile and everyone who reads the person who’s retweeted it! A retweet is almost like a little award, obtaining one can snowball and before you know it you’ve reached hundreds maybe even thousands of people! To retweet someone else’s content should you choose to, look under the post you want to do it to and click the button saying “retweet” – job done! By retweeting others people should be appreciative and take more notice of what you are saying. Remember, do onto others as you wish done onto you.
14. Links. By posting links, whether a youtube video, article or funny story, people will start to look to you for more of the same. Due to the 140 character limit URL’s can often take up too many. This is why URL shorteners have been created. I personally use bitly.com but there are others out there. Simply visit www.bitly.com and enter the URL you want to relink on twitter into the box provided. For instance;
http://funnyjokesblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-men-are-never-depressed.html would take up far too many characters, but when put into bitly.com it becomes;
http://bit.ly/8UFxFn
Much better.
15. Pick your Pics. Although not fundamentally appreciated for sharing pictures, that’s Facebook territory, Twitter does offer this function. To do so, visit www.twitpic.com and log in using your Twitter account. Here you follow the instructions to upload pictures from your computer, when it says ‘post this’ if you do, a link will automatically be tweeted on your Twitter account. Excellent.
liked the snipe at russell brand cos his dvd is below par.
ReplyDeleteHaha thanks, even though this is meant to be one of my serious posts I had to have a little punch of opinion! Check out my other articles and see what you think.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment though.