antheia

It took some getting used to, but I’ve learned to love Twitter. Largely by learning how to use it: what to post, how to interact with people, and what toys were available to augment it. Here is some of what I’ve learned.

Nobody cares what you’re doing right now.

Just ignore the question posed by the update box. I have almost never tweeted* what I am really doing right at that moment. If I did, it would be a daily barrage of “checking my email”, “drinking some coffee”, “being annoyed by coworkers”. Nobody is interesting enough to make that worthwhile, not even Stephen Fry or Eddie Izzard. A good tweet is similar to a topic sentence: short, interesting, and meaningful. And what’s really key is that it should invite a response.

So it’s sort of social. Demented and sad, but social.

What makes Twitter really fun is interacting with people. The best description I’ve heard is that it’s like blogging meets ICQ. I ask a question, and my friends come back with answers. Someone I follow posts something interesting and I respond with a comment. There are a couple of ways to interact with your feed. The first, and most common, is an “@” reply. Place an @ symbol before the username** (i.e., “@antheia” - make sure not to leave a space between the symbol and the name), and then type out your response. On the Twitter website, this will show up in your “@replies”. Most Twitter clients will also highlight these especially. The other way to @reply is simply to hit the arrow next to the post in question on the Twitter page, then fill out the rest of the message. (Again, on most clients, there will also be a reply button.) @replies can be seen by anyone who’s following you, so it’s not uncommon to wind up with someone totally unrelated to the initial comment replying to you.

The next method is direct messaging. These are private messages between you and another user (you can’t direct message, or DM, people who don’t follow you); where @replies are seen by everyone, only the sender and the recipient can see direct messages. To send a DM, put a d and a space before the username (i.e., “d antheia”), then fill out the box. Any direct messages you receive will show up on your Direct Message page.

The final way is re-tweeting. This is, basically, passing on something amusing/interesting/important that was said by someone you follow to the rest of your followers. There is no “official” way to do this, but the most common is to put RT, then the @username and the text in the box. For example: RT: @racebending: http://tinyurl.com/dd4emo YAY Sequential Tart! Article about Last Airbender and historical references. :D. It’s been my experience that the best way to get something retweeted is simply to ask by adding “please retweet” or “plz RT” to the end of the item.

But really, how do I get more followers?

There’s no hard and fast rule on this. Post things that are interesting. Seek out people who post things you’re interested in and interact with them. And use an avatar with your face in it. Where blogs are largely about ideas and interests, Twitter is about connecting with people. Show your face. Or hey, maybe you don’t want everyone to see you and be your friend. That’s cool, too. But there are only two levels of security on Twitter: all or nothing. If you lock your updates, only people you follow can see them, which means that new people will have no idea what you’re about, making them less likely to follow you unless you’re friends in another context. This is totally cool, but a lot like locking your back door in a small town.

OMG, all these freaking #s are driving me crazy!

Get over it: hashtags are your friends. They identify themes in tweets, are searchable on search.twitter.com, and allow for topic trending on sites like Twist. I used the #rangers tag to find the first few new people I met on Twitter, and now find myself enmeshed in a great group of general #hockey types over there, thanks to the combination of hasthags and @replies. I’m not saying you should use it to become a big ol’ hockey fan (although I think that’d be awesome), but that these tags will help you to find people interested in the topics you’re interested in. Although they’re most commonly placed at the end of a tweet (“I really hope they win the game! #rangers”), hashtags can be used in the body for the same result (“I really hope the #rangers win the game!”).

If you’re starting a blog or tweeting about an issue that you want people to get involved in, I would strongly suggest coming up with a hashtag to identify it and spread the word. For instance, anyone tweeting about SXSW included #sxsw in their text.

There are toys for this, right? I know you: you’re all about extras!

There is so much you can do to make Twitter better, faster, stronger. Here are some of the tools I use pretty much every day:

1. Because of the character limit, a URL shortener is key. I use is.gd, but other popular choices are tinyurl, bit.ly, and twurl.

2. TwitPic is stupid amounts of fun. In its own words, it “lets you share photos on Twitter”. You can upload from the website or your camera phone, and add text for the post in either case.

3. Firefox users should download the Power Twitter add-on right off the bat. It has some crazy awesome features that integrate with the main Twitter website, like showing you what the links actually lead to, allowing you to see not only @replies, but anywhere your username has been mentioned in a tweet. It is pure awesome. (They also have a twitter feed: @powertwitter.)

4. Also for Firefox is the Twitter Fox add-on, which I use at work. It notifies you when your feed is updated, highlights @replies & direct messages, and offers separate tabs for the three levels of messages (regular feed, replies, direct messages).

5. I prefer to keep up using TweetDeck, which is a downloadable Twitter client. It automatically separates your feed into three groups: All Friends, Replies, Direct Messages. But where it really scores points is that it allows you to break your feed down into groups of your own choosing. At first, it seems unnecessary, but once you really dig in, you’ll be thankful. (They have a twitter account, too: @TweetDeck.)

6. Blip.fm is for all you music sharing junkies out there. It lets you find a song and post a link to a streamed copy along with text. And you can listen to a stream of what your friends have blipped recently. It’s pretty much made of win. (You can also incorporate it into both last.fm and Livejournal.)

7. If you have a smartphone, download a client. I use Twitterberry on my Blackberry, and I’ve heard things about the Tweetie app for the iPhone.

Is the lingo as annoying as I think it is?

Sadly, yes it is. Friends on Twitter will often be referred to as “tweeple” or “tweeps”. This is only the tip of the iceberg. But my suggestion is to learn to live with it if you can, because you’re not going to convince anyone to stop.

*Posts made on Twitter are called “tweets”.

**Usernames in Twitter are always referred to with an @ as a prefix. So I would be @antheia, rather than antheia.