How to Twitter

There is quite a lot more to twitter than initially meets the eye. The following are the very basics of what I have learnt so far.

1. First set up your twitter account. Its deceptively easy to do. Just go to http://twitter.com/ and choose an account name. First decision: do you use your name or your business name? Whatever you use, you only have fifteen characters to do it in, so if you have a long name you may want to use just your initials, or just your initials and surname. There are varying opinions on whether you use your business name. Some people say that others are connecting with personalities on twitter and thus your own name is best. I have more than one twitter account so I can tweet as me or directly from the business.
2. Once you have your account (and you will need to check no-one else has already grabbed your prize name and you have to think again), then you need to set up your profile. You can keep your posts private or just for those you approve to read them but generally, if you are twittering for business, you will want all tweets to be public.
3. Remember when you are tweeting, if you have chosen public, that the whole world could read what you write. Try to stick to interesting news, useful tips and the *occasional* promotion of your business.
4. Start following some people that you know – friends or business acquaintences. See what they are tweeting about and what style they are using. If you follow your friends they will probably follow you and get you started with followers, but don’t worry if not everyone you follow follows you back.
5. To reply to someone, go to their tweet as it appears on your twitter page. As you put the mouse over to the right of the tweet you will see a little arrow appear. Click on this and you can reply to someone. It will be a public reply. If you want to send them a private message (known as a Direct Message on twitter or DM), click on their name and on their page click ‘message’.
6. If someone tweets something you think is good you can RT or re-tweet it. In your status copy their message and put RT at the beginning. If you put their name with an @ symbol in front then it will link to that person’s twitter account and they will see that you have re-sent their message. Remember that just because you are following that person doesn’t mean all the people who follow you are also following them. So re-tweeting messages gets that particular tweet out to a wider audience.

That should get you started. There is a lot more to Twitter like setting your background, sending picture links etc., but the best way is to get started and learn gradually. If you want to know more now here are one or two resources:

Top 7 Twitter commands everyone should know
Putting url links in a tweet – recommend bit.ly
What are, and how to use, Hash Tags

Got any other tips? Do comment below.

Tags: twitter

This entry was posted on January 18, 2011 at 10:14 am and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.