Twitter is a free social messaging channel that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets, to stay connected in real-time. Once just a fad, Twitter is developing into a powerful form of communication and is now considered to be the fastest growing social network.
The basic idea of Twitter is to allow users to broadcast short messages limited to 140 characters known as “tweets”, to anyone who opts to receive them. It’s a free service that was designed with mobile phones in mind, but allows users to connect via the Web, IM applications and also via numerous other Twitter applications as well.
Tweets are time stamped and listed in chronological order.
Timeline
A series of tweets displayed on a Twitter page. When you refresh the page, new tweets appear at the top of the timeline and older tweets scrolled down off the bottom.
Follow
When you follow somone on Twitter, that means you elect to see in your timeline the tweets that they post. Twitter lists this in your profiles as your “following” statistics. Your “followers” a.k.a. your “posse”, “tweeps”, or “tweeple”, are the people who have chosen to view your tweet updates on their homepages.
What’s with the @s?
To send a tweet which addresses a specific person, you make what is called a “reply”. It is done by using the “@” sign and then the person’s Twitter username. For example, if you enter a tweet with “@sitereviver” in its contents, it would show up in the sitereviver’s replies page of Twitter. Most people put a person’s Twitter username at the beginning of their tweet, but you can include it anywhere in your tweet.
RT
RT is an abbreviation of ReTweet, which amounts to ‘repeat’. It is like forwarding, only its for tweets instead of emails. If you see something really cool from one of the people you follow, you may want to ReTweet it so that the people following you (and not the original person) can see it. Note that RT is a slang, and not a system function. Twitter does not do anything special if you put in the RT and it is simply a way of giving recognition to the tweet of anther “tweemple” that you find interesting.
How not to use replies
It’s not really that useful, or for that matter convenient, to frequently reply “ha!” “lol” or “so true” to something someone has “tweeted”. This can be annoying when a group of people with similar interests follow each other and your well intentioned tweets begin to fill up someone’s Twitter feed. Also, it’s not a good idea to reply without providing context. Twitter has a notion of threaded conversations, but it also moves pretty fast so it’s a good idea to reply with context as to which tweet you’re responding to.
Direct Messages
A direct message is a private form of communication between two Twitter users. There are several different ways to send a direct message. The most common is to click on a username in your Twitter feed and then on the right side of the page you’ll see a hyperlink, and a box will appear which will allow you to type a message that will only be visible to the recipient and will not appear on the public timeline.
Twitter hash tags (#)
Hash tags or pound signs (#) help to designate topics that people might search for – especially when they want to distinguish the word from a common phrase.
Search
Twitter has a built-in search engine that searches all tweets in the public timeline. The URL search.twitter.com, lets you carry out a simple search if you’re looking for a simple keyword, but if you want to narrow that search to a location, person, date, or many other limiters, use the advanced search tool.
Links in tweets
Twitter posts can only be 140 characters long, and sometimes you might want to post longer URLs or URLs with a longer description. You can shorten long URLs with services such as tinyurl.com or bit.ly. When posting links with these services, try to be polite and include a description along with your tweet. Your followers may get hundreds of tweets per day, and before they click on a link, they want more information than just “Check this out!” or “Wowsers!”
#FollowFriday
On Fridays, people post a tweet that includes a list of other people they thing you should follow. If you like following one person, and if they list other people on #FollowFriday, then you might like following those people too. It’s like book recommendations from friend.
Tweetup
This is when a bunch of Twitter users get together for an “in person” meeting or a “meet-up”, Twitter has a new official Tweetup page.
Tweeple
If you are tempted to refer to Twitter users as twits, don’t. They prefer to be referred as “tweeple”.
Twitter HT
If you found out about something through a Twitter user, and you want to name them, you use HT (Heard it Through them). This is a different from RT, because it usually means you heard it in real life, not over Twitter.
Twitter OH
If you hear something funny or insightful, as opposed to reading it on Twitter, and you want to repeat it, you can prefix it with OH, which is short for OverHeard. Generally, this is used anonymously, and not for quoting people.
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Very informative!
Very helpful tutorial. Thank you very much.
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