Feb
New To Twitter? Here Are Some Tips…
Not sure I’d agree that Twitter is full-on “mainstream” yet but it has certainly hit the headlines in recent weeks what with the news of the Hudson plane crash breaking on Twitter and the recent “event” that was Stephen Fry getting stuck in a lift and tweeting whilst there to his 95,000-odd followers.
Today is an important event for Twitterers everywhere – it’s Twestival day.
Over 150 cities around the world are hosting their own Twestivals – a face-to-face gathering of Twitterers – in order to raise money for Charity: Water (did you know that right now, 1.1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water? That’s one in six of us). You can donate here.
Otherwise, this post is largely written for my Dad – a recent joiner to Twitter. I am convinced he joined just so that he could cyberstalk me some more, after numerous reminders over the past few months that I hadn’t been updating my blogs enough (something to do with constant nausea and morning sickness – but what does that matter?!?).
He’s a little bit of a newbie and in light of that, I thought I’d post some tips for you, Daddy, on how to get the best out of Twitter…
1 – If you want specific people to see a Tweet you write, start the tweet with @ plus their username. For example, if you’d like to send a tweet to me specifically, you’d type: “@leawoodward …”. That way, if I go to the “Replies” tab on my profile, I can see any tweets directed specifically at me. This makes it much easier for people who follow and are followed by hundreds of people. Our Twitter stream (the messages we see on screen) can get very full at peak times, so it’s easy to miss a message if there’s no @ attached to it.
2 – Similarly to #1, if you want to reply directly to something that someone else has tweeted, the best way to do it (so that they’ll see it), is to click on the “reply to…” arrow that appears on the screen when you hover next to a tweet. This will then automatically include the @username in your tweet and make it easy for the person to see you’ve replied to them.
3 – Beware of SPAM bots and out-and-out marketers who follow you. They can’t necessarily do anything to you/your account but I’d rather have people following me who are real, live people looking to interact/connect. That’s one reason I protected my updates – the other was to protect from friends and family “spying” on me!! I think it’s a bit like eavesdropping on my conversations if you’re going to sit silently and watch me interact and tweet with my Twitter buddies, and not join in.
4 – If you see “RT…” and you’re wondering what that means, it means “Retweet” and is a way of passing on a tweet that someone else has tweeted that you like and want to give a hat tip to the original tweeter and pass the message on.
5 – Due to the 140 character restriction on Twitter, you might like to use a service like TinyURL to automatically shorten long URLs for you so they fit. If you download a Firefox/Flock extension, you can do this very easily with right-click of the mouse.
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
- Pingback by What If Twitter Went Down & Never Came Back Up? | Lea Woodward on August 13, 2009 @ 12:47 pm
Thanks kidda, much appreciated advice to probably one of the older twitterers on the block. My intentions were honourable – it was the Hudson river pic that got me interested.
The twestival idea was brilliant. Underpublicised outside of twitterdom though. I see there was one in Bangkok, but not here in Phuket.
Water is such an important issue. I’ve tried for many years to think of good ways that only use readily available energy – wind, sun – for purifying water, either polluted water or sea water. Solar cells work, but are too costly. The ways should be both small scale, suitable for home use, or large scale e.g. desalination that doesn’t cause greenhouse gases. A solution to this problem would change the world.
There wasn’t much point in advertising Twestival outside of Twitter tho – wouldn’t have attracted people to go to it so advertising purely thru Twitter makes perfect sense…advertise to the target market precisely where you’ll find them!!
The news coverage on the day/night was pretty widespread though – think most Twestivals featured on their locals news around the globe. Even saw a couple of my Twitter buds on the TV!
Given that you’re a scientist, surely you can figure the water conundrum out? You’d change the world and make a fortune in the process ;)