Twitter N00b

For all you Twitter n00bs out there, here’s a quick recap:

On Twitter, you send tweets or messages that are 140 characters or less. You can search for people in the ‘find people’ tab and follow them by pressing the follow button underneath their name.

It is good for you to put up a picture of yourself or of something cool and to write up a little bio so the people who may want to follow you can get a good sense of your personality.

On your profile page, which is twitter.com/__yourscreenname__, you can see on the right hand side the number of people following you, the number of followers you have, the number of lists you have and the
number of tweets you have written.

To send a tweet to someone, you use the @reply (you can find this by hovering over their tweet and the @reply will show up on the bottom right hand side of the tweet) or you can simply write @theiruserscreenname. You can see which people write to you by clicking on the @youruserscreenname on your homepage. If you are following the person and they are following you back, you can send them a dm or direct message so that the tweet doesn’t show up in their public feed. You can see your direct messages by clicking on it on the homepage. The number next to the direct messages shows how many you have received. You can tell if the person is following you by using the drop down menu and looking for their screen name. If it isn’t there, then they aren’t following you. If you send the person a direct message without them following you, then they will not be able to receive the message.

Hashtags are used to categorize your tweet. For example, if you write a tweet about an awesome pizza place in San Francisco, you can use the hashtag #SanFrancisco or #pizza. You can pretty much make the hashtag whatever you want but you normally want to make it make sense so other people can find your tweet when they search for it.

Favorites are tweets that you enjoy and want to keep in a separate area so you can read them again. You can favorite a tweet by clicking on the right hand star next to the tweet. Favorites are also located on the right hand toolbar side.

People enjoying sending retweets when they think someone’s tweet was cool or interesting and want to share it with the rest of their followers. There are two ways of retweeting: the old way to do retweets is to copy and paste the content and include RT @userscreenname in the front (or via @userscreenname at the end of the tweet). The new way of doing retweets is by hovering over the tweet and clicking on the retweet button.

You can also make lists, which is an awesome way for you to group people. You can make a list for all the people that you want to make sure you read on a daily basis or all the people that enjoy playing the same online games as you. Just click new list and you’re off!

Trending topics are the current topics that everyone is talking about on twitter. By clicking on one of the topics, twitter will take you to a page that will list all of the tweets talking about that topic. If you click on the trending topic that says Christmas, then some of the tweets you will read will include ‘I love the smell of pine trees’ or ‘My monkey looks funny in an elf suit.’

You can also follow tweets by clicking on the RSS feed.

If you find someone spamming your feed, you can just click the ‘report for spam button’ and it will both report the spam and block the spammer.

You can also hook up your cel phone to twitter by going to settings and mobile. Just input your number and save the number 40404 to your cel phone. You follow the same twitter rules on your cel phone for the most part. You can also check out mobile.twitter.com if you have one of those handy dandy iphones.

If you want to get more hardcore about things, you can download a desktop client to help keep you on top of your tweets. There are awesome desktop apps such as Tweetie or Tweetdeck to help you organize your tweets better. I am personally fond of Tweetie and you can also find many of these apps on the iphone (the Tweetie iphone version is currently on 2.1.)

And that’s my quick recap. If you have any other questions, just shoot me a tweet to @ladyfox14.