Twitter First Steps

Author: Deanne Bullen

Index

Before you join
Why do people use twitter
Branding – Inserting your picture or logo
What’s on the side
Finding people you want to follow on twitter
Finding People to Follow
Posting your first Tweet
Explore
Twitter language and conventions
Managing twitter feeds
Twitter links for librarians

Before you join

I’m a big fan of twitter but there are many who think twitter is a waste of time. Before you set up a twitter account you might want to take a couple of moments to think about how twitter works and who you might like to follow and why.

Why do people use twitter

This is a question that has generated quite a bit of conversation. Following is a list of examples gathered from looking at discussions online, my own personal experience and from talking to others.

Twitter can keep you informed about current technology issues
It’s a resource for news and local grassroots activities
You can follow people with similar interests – find out about recipes, healthcare, politics
You can follow a variety of people really easily all at the same time – friends, experts, celebrities
You can ask questions and receive answers quickly – if the people you are following on twitter don’t have the answer they often ask others on their network
It’s a quick and easy way to get marketing messages out to interested people
Quick and easy networking
Connects you with people
Great way to cross pollinate ideas and share then ideas across a broad cross section quickly and easily
Good way to stay in touch with people and know what they are doing without being intrusive
A source of rich links to information
Quick way to get information out to followers
Good resource for backchannel conversations at conferences and events
A way to find resources
Good for crowdsourcing and finding answers to questions.
Twitter allows people to use their friend lists to propagate that information faster, and try to draw more direct help down to a problem.

Joint the Twitter

Go to www.twitter.com and select the green button – Get Started - at the bottom of the page. This will take you to the twitter registration page

Join the conversation

The registration page takes about 2 minutes to complete.

Enter your full name in the Full Name field
Choose a username - You have 20 characters to work with (Twitters limit).

Why a username needs to be short, simple and easy to remember:

- when replying to a tweet with a long name, a reply of 140 characters will be affected
- a long or complicated username is difficult for mobile phones users.

Password: Make you password as complex as possible. The best passwords are a collection of letters and numbers in no order.

Email address: twitter uses this to notify you of new followers as well as service news update.
When you’ve completed entering all of the information click the green button at the bottom of the page to create your account.

Branding – Inserting your picture or logo

Go to Settings select the Picture option (grey tabs) select the image you want to upload as your brand by clicking browse and selecting it from your hard drive.

Inserting Picture or logo

Click Save and your image will be uploaded. Twitter will tell you when it has been successful. DO NOT click save again as this will delete the image.

Within Settings on your Accounts page you will also be able to provide information about yourself. This includes:

Information about who you are and what you do – your bio.
Web address.

Setting Up account

Your bio, web address information will display on your profile page.

What’s on the side

On the right hand side you cans access your replies and private messages as well as Twitter search and trends.

Finding People to Follow

There are tens of millions of people on Twitter which can make it very overwhelming when you first start out but there are ways to find people:

Who are relevant to you
Industry or markets that are of interest to you.

But how do you find them?

Here a just a couple of suggestions to get you started.

Twellow – the twitter yellowpages

Twellow allows you to search for people by category. The service also tells you how many followers a person has.

Justtweetit.com is a free directory which you will need to register for. Once you have done this you will be able to look for other people in the categories that interest you.

Posting your first Tweet

You have your twitter account, you are following people and your page is branded. Now it’s time to say hello.

Remember if you have followed people they may be coming to see what you’re about if it's just blank or says Hello World they may not follow you back.

Explore

You have posted your first twitter and anyone following you will also see the message – of course this will only happen if they are checking twitter at that very moment or if you have used @name or sent a direct message.

Look out for @replies going to other Twitter users from people you follow by selecting the @name you will be taken to their page where you can see what they are talking about. If the person/organisation is of interest to you select the follow under their picture.

Twitter language and conventions

Tweet or a Twit – is your twitter entry or reply to someone

Retweet generally seen as RT – is when you re-tweet something somebody already tweet’ed already and always starts with RT:

Hashtags – Hashtags are commonly used to create buzz, but many tweeters use it for easy search on common topic. Hashtags start with #hashtag. The use of #hashtags at conferences and events has become quite common to assist with following conversations and for returning to conversations.

Twittersphere – you can use it an sentence like the “Twittersphere is going crazy today about.....”

Direct message generally seen as DM – When you see someone tweeting to you “Please DM me that link” means they would like you to send him/her direct message. Always go to direct messages and send message from there – sometimes people make the mistakes of sending a tweet marked dm but not DM’ing and sending the message public.

Managing twitter feeds

tweetfeed is a tool used by many.

Tweetfeed is:

A customizable page that displays related Twitter activity live.
A way to keep track of what is happening on Twitter that interests you (and share it with friends).
An easy way to create "tweet walls" for conferences and events!
Allows you to create groups.