Twitter is great. It’s the ideal social media platform for busy people or folks with short attention spans! Everything about it is short and sweet. It’s perfect for networking, keeping up with busy friends, connecting with your favourite celebrities and for telling the world exactly what’s on your mind… in 140 characters or less.
And now you want to become one of the 200 million tweeters and join the fun but it all seems a little confusing and you don’t know where to start? Well no worries, here’s a Muppets guide to Twitter, from one Muppet to another.
First things first. You’ll need a Twitter account!
Setting up a Twitter account:
Go to www.twitter.com and follow the set-up procedure on the front page (middle right of the screen).
This is really simple and will take no longer than a few minutes and is all explained on screen as you go.
Once you’ve set up your account, it’s time for the fun bit.
The Basics & Tweeting:
Twitter is a micro blogging site where you share short posts, referred to as “Tweets”, of up to 140 characters long with your “Followers”.
Posting a tweet is simple. Under where it says “What’s Happening” type in your message. When you are finished, hit the ‘tweet’ button.
Sending a Tweet is the simple bit. The problem when you start is, what to Tweet?
You can Tweet about news items or current events of interest, links to articles or videos you wish to share, or anything that is going on with you that you feel your “followers’ might be interested in hearing about.
People generally won’t care that you’re bored, hungry or just off for a shower, so try and keep your tweets as interesting as possible and omit the mundane aspects of what’s going on.
Once you start and get the hang of it, you’ll be surprised how easy it’ll become.
Following and followers:
On Twitter you ‘Follow’ people who you know, like, want to network with, have similar interests with or who’s tweets you may find of interest. And of course, everyone else has the option to ‘Follow’ you too.
On the left hand side of your screen on Twitter you’ll see that there is a timeline where tweets from people you follow will appear. And on other users timelines, your tweets will appear if they follow you.
It’s important to note that on Twitter, unlike social networking sites like Facebook, just by following someone doesn’t mean they automatically follow you back.
Replying to Tweets:
One of the best ways to get noticed or to network on Twitter is to reply to other peoples tweets and engage with them.
You do this simply by clicking ‘reply’ under the relevant tweet that you wish to reply to.
Checking your replies and mentions:
Click ‘@mentions’ which is next to the ‘timeline’ tab and this will show you who has either replied to one of your tweets or who has mentioned you in one of their tweets.
Retweeting:
If someone posts a link, article or comment that you wish to share with your followers, you can simply click on ‘Retweet’ under the relevant tweet and this tweet will then appear on all of your followers timelines.
Retweeting is another great way to engage and support other users, who in turn might Retweet your Tweets to their users.
Don’t abuse this feature though. If people’s timelines get filled up with Tweets you’ve Retweeted from people they don’t know, not only do you devalue the worth of Retweeting these Tweets (no one gets that many important Tweets that they need to Retweet 10 in 2 minutes), but you can probably expect to be ‘Unfollowed’ too if you annoy people by flooding their timelines with Retweets.
If you find your timeline is filling up with Retweets from someone you Follow and you don’t want to Unfollow them, but are sick of their Retweeting antics, then you can go to their profile and click on the green highlighted circle with white squared arrows (that’s close to the green FOLLOWING button) and that will stop that persons Retweets from appearing in your timeline (their actual tweets that they post themselves will still appear though, fear not.).
#Tagging:
Twitter spawns many debates, trending topics and series of conversions. To make it easier to follow these discussion and trending topics people often attach a #Tag which you can click on and will show you all other Tweets with the same tag.
For example;
If everyone is tweeting about a major news story or a crazy rumor, say the Moon exploded perhaps(?), everyone would be talking about it and would tag their tweets #MoonExploded
e.g.
“OMG – I just heard the moon exploded, Is this true? I hope the Clangers are okay… #MoonExploded”
You could then click on the #tag (#MoonExploded) and it would show you all the other tweets people were posting about the Moon exploding.
Follow Friday, #FF, #FollowFriday:
Follow Friday is where, on a friday, you can recommend people to follow. These tweets are usually just the Twitter username of the person or persons you are recommending, tagged with either #FF or #FollowFriday.
The benefits of Follow Friday are debatable, but it doesn’t hurt and it’s always nice to be recommended as a #FF, but whether people take any notice of these Tweets and actually end up following you as a result of this recommendation really remains to be seen.
And that’s about it. Just remember, like all social networking sites, you’ll get out of it what you put in.
Happy tweeting.
