Last week, @gaurisalokhe invited Jon from (AidWorker Daily) and I as guest speakers in a short FAO info session about micro blogging.

I realized how difficult it is to explain what this social media phenomenon really is all about. Does “Twitter is a micro-blogging tool” associate it too much with “blogging”: “I publish, you read, and if all goes well, you might even comment”?

Maybe this is what Twitter was originally intended for, but how do you explain to anyone it is much more than just ‘publishing 140 character content’. How do you explain the dynamic and the power of a Twitter social community of “followers”?

Another challenge is to explain that apart from ”www.twitter.com”, the web interface for Twitter, there are hundreds of add-ons and tools that make Twitter work for you.

I use Twitter for:

• yep, publishing “content”: links I find interesting, updates about what I do (with text, pictures and video)
• build a social community with people who have similar interests by interacting with my followers
• get people interested in my blogs by tweeting links to new posts
• get help and feedback by asking questions, posting polls
• give help and feedback by answering questions and polls
• monitor news and trends
• reading up on what others are reading and find interesting
• monitor the latest updates from sites and subjects I am interested in, almost as an alternative to an RSS reader
• get inspiration
• live blogging from events, workshops
• have fun

But the person next door might use it for something completely different:

• fundraising
• announcing where you can get free Pizzahut coupons
• rallying up the masses to protest against the Iran violence
• bash CNN, just because they are such an easy target
• broadcasting what second hand items she has for sale
• stay in touch with friends
• …

Is Twitter worth the trouble?

Yes it is. Here are three cases which showed me the power of twitter:

1. Late one evening, someone in my Twitter users’ community tweeted me:

Are you guys expelled from Sudan? This article (link) says so!

The linked article indeed stated the organisation I work for was expelled from Sudan, around the time 13 NGOs were forced to leave the country. Which was incorrect. As this issue was very sensitive for us, I contacted our Public Information people, who called the publishers of the website. Half an hour later, the –potentially damaging- statement was corrected. Without Twitter, I would never have caught that article.

2. A few months ago, I tweeted:

Looking for a webguru to help us analysing a complicated portal development project

Sure enough someone from my community replied. He was available within two weeks. We started communicating via Email, and in the end, he actually found a grant from the Gates Foundation to fund his trip. I not only found a webguru, but got him fast and for free.

3. Last week, I tweeted:

Writing a post about blogplatforms. I know Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr but looking for a TypePad geek to help me out

Three people responded and assisted me in the article, filling in the blanks I left. Two were part of my followers’ community, the other one was just searching Twitter for the keyword “TypePad”.

Twitter for Dummies

In this series, “Twitter for Dummies”, or call it “A Twitter Primer”, I will cover this social media phenomenom from the bottom up. What Twitter is, what the different components are, best practices, the tricks of the trade, and a list of the most useful add-ons. How to make Twitter work for your nonprofit purposes?
In the tradition of BlogTips, I will spec these posts with my own experiences.

In the next post we tackle “How to explain Twitter as a social networking tool?”

Interesting links to wet your appetite:

17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners
An analysis of fundraising with Twitter
Using Twitter for nonprofit and advocacy
How to use Twitter as a Twool
7 uncommon uses for Twitter

Cartoon courtesy Boston Globe (Mike Luckovich)

In the previous post, I elaborated what I use Twitter for, both at work and for my personal sites.

So what is this “Twitter”-thingie then, hey? How can I explain Twitter as a social community tool rather than a blogging tool…? Well try these approaches:

How to explain Twitter? Think of Skype, but different!

You know instant messengers (IM) like Skype or MSN messenger? Then you know how with instant messengers, you can look for friends, add them to your address book and then type messages online.
At its best, you can add several friends into a conversation, type away and have some fun. All your “chats” remain private between those within that conversation.

Twitter is a similar tool, but all text messages are “broadcasted”: they are public messages with a maximum of 140 characters. I don’t have to be in a conversation with one or more people like in Skype. I broadcast. And millions of others are broadcasting just like me, resulting in a mega-stream of thousands public text messages per minute (currently about 10,000 to 15,000 per minute). Any of my “broadcasts” can be searched for, replied to, or rebroadcasted by any other Twitter user.

If people find the stuff I broadcast interesting, they tag me (or become a “follower” in Twitter-lingo). If people “follow me”, they will automatically filter my updates out of the mega stream of a zillion Twitter messages. They will do so for all their followers, effectively creating a message filter for stuff they like and people they are interested in.

In the following example, I “follow” Karim, Ann and John. Out of the millions of other broadcasts, I filter their messages, so will only see the Tweets they broadcast and no others.

Turning it around: I don’t only broadcast, I also listen (not enough, my wife would say, but that is another issue.. ). I look for friends, or broader, people who are interested in the same stuff I am, and “follow” them.

This interaction between ‘broadcasting’ and ‘listening’, results in each Twitter user building a social community of “followers”… People follow me, find my updates interesting, and stay tuned. Friends of friends (or “followers” of those who “follow me”) see interactions with me, check my broadcasts, and become my followers… Gradually, the group grows. The larger the group, the more effective Twitter becomes as a social community for me.

And Twitter communities grow organically. Using the same example, but showing a broader view of the communities around me:

Karim, Ann, John and me follow each other, this is my social community, as it is centered around “who follows me”. Likewise, Ann, Andy and me are the social community centered around Karim.

Twitter has made it easy to find out “who follows who”, and following new people is done “by a click”, so social communities grow very quickly and organically. Just like “friends of my friends” might become “my friends” in real life:

In the above example, do you see the chain of John-Roman-Suzy-Roanna-Mary? Roman follows both John and Suzy, but Suzy and John don’t follow each other.
Suzy will see Roman interact with John via Twitter, and as they have a common “friend” with John, I bet you Suzy will start following John, as there is a good chance they have common interests.

How do I explain Twitter to someone? Think of TV.

As you flip that dial on your satellite TV, you can find hundreds of stations. If you are interested in music, and news, you will put those stations you like in your pre-select channels: CNN, Al-Jazeera and MTV.

Twitter is the same. You scan for those users you like, and you put them in your pre-select channels by “following” them.

Except that you will watch to all your pre-selected channels at the same time, like some of those mosaic features some TVs have… “Listening on Twitter” is like watching that mosaic picture

How do I explain Twitter to someone? Think of CB radio.

Remember in the 70-ies, many of us had this little black box with a microphone, and a hidden antenna on the roof. Well at least I did! I would be one of those getting up in the morning, and shout out “Breaker, breaker, this is Rubberduck, gooooood morning to everyone!”…

In the beginning, nobody would ever come back to me, but as I started to interact with other CB-ers, we started to tune into each other’s channels, and I started to get replies to my “good morning” shouts. Later on, we picked one channel where we could always find each other, and interacted day and night…

A social community was built. How it was used, was up to the participants… Some of us, only used it to keep us company in lonely hours. Some used CB to have fun and joke around. Others used it to get traffic information, finding out where the “bears” were with their speed cameras. Other teens used it to work on projects for school, and there were people who organised fundraising parties for charity…

Twitter is the same. With one additional feature: I can record what others were talking about, and re-broadcast it on my CB channel.

Visualizing your social community

TwitNest, a cool Twitter network visualisation tool, shows exactly what I mean with ‘social networks’.

Here is a part of my Twitter network, centered around my @TheRoadTo, my personal Twitter username, showing a small icon for each of the people I follow, and a line connecting who is following who:

As you can see, this network, is centered around me:

Twitter user “@fighthunger” is part of my community. Here are the people within my community they follow, the followers we have in common:

And here are the users “@ithorpe”, one of my followers,… euh… follows..

Play with Twitnest, it is interesting as it also “groups” people, based on ‘who is following who’…
Sociologists would have a real go at trying to figure out how people are grouped, how social communities are formed and grow organically.

In my community for instance, I can clearly see different groups popping up, dependent on the common interest my followers have. Some of them are ‘aidworkers’. Other groups I recognize, are ‘IT people’, ‘those interested in social media’, ‘news stations’ and ‘nonprofit organisations’…

In the next post, we will go more in depth on “Twitter, the tool”.

Cartoon courtesy Geek and Poke

In part 1 of this series, I described what I use Twitter for. In part 2, I highlighted Twitter as a social networking tool.
In this post, we will go slightly more technical: looking at the parts in the engine that make Twitter really useful.

Twitter.com

The core of it all is the blue box, twitter.com. This is where all the Tweets and Twitter profiles are stored, and the engine with which everything connects.

The Twitter website

When you first sign up to Twitter, you connect via the web interface, Twitter’s main web page. It lets you modify your profile and settings, search for Tweets, add followers, browse through the updates or “Tweets” from all your followers, and send out Tweets yourself.
The usability of the webinterface is not the best, IMHO, e.g. the tweets from those you follow are not refeshed automatically, it is difficult to distinguish between “your Tweet updates” and “those of your social community”, etc.. But it lets you perform the basic functions: read what’s going on, and broadcast Tweets yourself.

Desktop tools

Most people use desktop tools (similar to what Skype has) such as Thwirl, Tweetdeck, or Seesmic. Each is a small Adobe Air application, which updates automatically the Tweets your community is broadcasting. They let you filter for “all tweets”, “replies only”, “direct messages”, and let you search for Twitterers or Tweets. I hardly ever use the webinterface, but always have a window open with Seesmic and Twhirl.

Input processors

There are additional ‘input’ tools, to ease posting stuff on Twitter. The most popular are:

• URL shorteners convert the links you want to use in your Tweets to a real short URL. Some, like bit.ly, which I use the most, also give you statistics for amount of clicks each of your links gets.
• TwitPic allows you to upload a picture and generates a link to the picture, which you can include in your Tweet. This is the tool Janis Krums used to post the famous picture of the plane in the Hudson river, by the way.
• Twitvid.io does the same for video
• twtpoll lets you post a small poll

There are hundreds of input tools. Twtbase is a great repository listing most of the add-on applications. You can post audio, include a link to longer updates if you feel too limited with Twitter’s 140 characters, schedule tweets, etc…

Using your mobile

Another way to interact with Twitter, is via your mobile phone. Many PDAs like the iPhone or Blackberry have a small application to read and write Tweets via an Internet link. You can also use your mobile’s SMS service to send or receive tweets via twitter.com directly. Or, if you prefer, use Email on your mobile to tweet, pictures and video as attachments, which get automatically converted into links via TwitPic or Twitvid.io.
This makes Twitter truly mobile.

Reusing content

A more sophisticated way of using Twitter is to take the RSS feed from your blog (or website) and tweet the titles and links to new blogposts automatically. Twitterfeed is the best known tool for this. Twitterfeed updates will through URL shorteners before being posted onto Twitter.

On the output site: search and query tools.

Between 10,000 to 15,000 Tweets are published per minutes, making Twitter a great data repository. You might not be interested in seeing how many people tweeted about the weather today, but searching for specific tags like #aid or #blogging or #michaeljackson would be more useful.
There are many query tools dependent on what exactly you search for, the depth of the search, and even more importantly, how it is presented to you.
Most of the search and query are also listed in Twtbase. My favourite query tools ar Twazzup and TwitterFall, which not only refresh queries automatically but also show pictures related to your query, the top users, related links, etc… Try also Twicsy to search for tweeted images.

Last but not least: reusing content from Twitter.

Dozens of tools let you take your (or anyone else’s) twitter updates, and republish them on an other website or blog automatically. You can also republish the Twitter content onto other social media services, such as Facebook, Friendfeed or Identi.ca…
If you are both a blogger and a twitterer, it is fashionable to include a widget to display your Twitter’s updates onto your blog or website. This interchanges readers from your blog with your Twitter account.

Interesting links:

- 17 Twitter Desktop applications
- Twtbase, the most extensive Twitter application database.
- 27 Twitter tools to help you find and manage followers
- Top 21 Twitter Applications
- 100 most popular Twitter applications
- An extensive list of Twitter tools for students

Stay tuned for Twitter for Dummies – part 4: The Geeky Art For Nerdy Tweets.

You have successfully created your Twitter account. You read part 1 of this series and have some pretty good idea what you will use Twitter for. You understand the importance of building social communities, and which tools can help you with those tasks…

And then… the blank Twitter prompt is staring in your face. What to do now?

Certain signs, abbreviations or keywords have a fixed meaning in the Tweet-o-sphere. Here is an overview of the Twitter syntax.

1. Handles:

Every user on Twitter has a unique user name (or call it “handle”). Within tweets, we refer to another user by prefixing his or her user name with the “@” sign.

“@JohnnyB” refers to the Twitter user handle “JohnnyB”.

Within a tweet, we use it like this:

Looking forward to meet @BloggerTip tonight

“@BloggerTip” refers to the Twitter username of this blog, BlogTips.

If you know someone’s user name, you can find their latest tweets with the URL http://twitter.com/username.

E.g. http://twitter.com/BloggerTip

By using uppercase and lowercase characters, users make their handle easier to read. For instance, “@ChangeThruInfo” is easier to grasp than “@changethruinfo”, no?

2. Replies:

when a Tweet starts with a handle name, it is a public message to that Twitter user:

@BloggerTip what u think about: “5 reasons Facebook is better than Twitter for your business” http://bit.ly/1suvPTC

3. Direct messages:

Tweets starting with “D” followed by a user name are private messages from one Twitter user to the other. Contrary to replies, these messages can not be seen by other users. Note that both Twitter users need to follow each other before “D” between them is allowed.

D @BloggerTip check out “Facebook better than Twitter for your business?” http://bit.ly/1suvPTC

4. Hash Tags:

Any word starting with the “#” hash sign, is a hash tag, indicating the subject of the tweet. More on the effective use of hash tags in the next post.

“Facebook better than Twitter for your business?” http://bit.ly/1suvPTC #socialmedia

The hash tag identifies the topic of this tweet as “#socialmedia”.

There are no fixed rules for hashtags, other than need to start with the ‘hash’ sign. Popular hash tags come and go. Some like #earthhour (the day we switch off our lights for one hour, remember?) shot to the most popular hashtag on March 28, the day of the actual event, and then disappeared as fast as they came.

Other hash tags like #iranelection became a way to tag all Tweets about the Iran post-election protests. #CNNfail protested the lack of coverage of certain news events by mainstream media.

#nomaintenance originated around the same time and was a popular tag which pushed Twitter to cancel their plans for maintenance down time one particular night…

5. Retweets:

And last but not least: any tweet starting with “RT” indicates you are re-broadcasting someone else’s tweet.

For instance, when @BloggerTip tweets:

“Facebook better than Twitter for your business?” http://bit.ly/1suvPTC

I can rebroadcast it as follows:

RT @BloggerTip “Facebook better than Twitter for your business?” http://bit.ly/1suvPTC

Retweets are at the core of what makes Twitter more than just a micro-blogging tool. In the next part, we will detail how to retweet effectively and how to make it easy for others to retweet you…

So stay tuned for Twitter for Dummies – part 5: 10 tips for effective tweeting

Additional reading:

The Official Twitter Text Commands

Cartoon courtesy Geek and Poke

You have successfully created your Twitter account. Through part 1 of this series you got some pretty good idea what you will use Twitter for. You understand the importance of building social communities, and which Twitter tools can help you with those tasks. Part 4 in this series thaught you the basic syntax of a tweet.

Now it is time to concentrate on how to tweet effectively, in 10 practical tips.

1. Use hash tags

Hash tags, keywords prefixed by “#”, beef up a tweet. They can emphasize a word, “classify” a tweet to a particular subject and make it easily searchable.

So:

“Meeting urgent hunger needs is a long term investment…in stability and world peace”

… might be nice, but better to beef it up:

“Meeting urgent hunger needs is a long term investment…in stability and world peace” #g8 #foodaid #hum

The hash tags in this example identified the tweet with the G8 meeting, with food aid and showed we were talking about a hum(anitarian) issue.

The popular hash tags in the non-profit world are
#humanitarian
#hum (as a short for the previous)
#nonprofit
#aid
#activism
#fundraising
#charity

There is no particular place to put hash tags, although most people put them at the end of their Tweet. Clever users integrate hash tags within their tweet to save space without taking away readability of a tweet:

Record level of #hunger and #poverty looms on #G8 agenda

2. Use links effectively

Plain vanilla tweets are ok as a statement, an intermezzo, but not to drive a message through:

ICRC scaling back significantly in Sri Lanka #aid

… would be more effective with the link:

ICRC scaling back significantly in Sri Lanka http://bit.ly/141hnZ #aid

… and even better: include the source of the link

BBC: ICRC scaling back significantly in Sri Lanka http://bit.ly/141hnZ #aid

Or

ICRC scaling back significantly in Sri Lanka (BBC) http://bit.ly/141hnZ#aid

By the way: there is no reason to use long URLs. They clutter the readability, eat up effective tweet-space:

ICRC scaling back significantly in Sri Lanka http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/south_asia/8141810.stm #aid

For the nerds amongst you: As Google page ranks all Twitter pages, some people think including the full link to their blog or website in a tweet will count as a valid back link. This is bollocks, as Twitter uses the “rel=nofollow” attribute for all links…

3. Make it easy for others to retweet you

The power of Twitter lays in how your tweet propagates through the tweet-o-sphere. Retweets are Twitter’s trade currency.
When someone retweets you, they give you a ‘vote of confidence’ by re-broadcasting your tweet to their own social community. Not only will a retweet re-broadcast your message but it will also propagate your Twitter-handle beyond your own social community so you can get ‘discovered’ by new potential followers.

In case you did not get the message yet: retweets are important. So, make it easy to be retweeted: Don’t use your full 140 characters for your tweet. When others want to retweet you, they need space to prefix “RT @yourhandle “ to your original tweet.

In the case of my private Twitter account “@TheRoadTo”, I know I can use 140 – 14 = 126 characters maximum for my tweets:

ICRC scaling back significantly in Sri Lanka (BBC) http://bit.ly/141hnZ #aid

Will – by default- be retweetable as:

RT @TheRoadTo ICRC scaling back significantly in Sri Lanka (BBC) http://bit.ly/141hnZ #aid

4. Don’t be scared to retweet.

The people I follow on Twitter, have interesting stuff to say. I retweet actively what I think is relevant, cool, funny, or controversial.

Don’t be a leech, though. When someone tweets a good link, give them credit by including their Twitter handle, and by making it clear you are retweeting rather than claiming this is YOUR original find.

Distinguish between plain vanilla retweets and edited retweets by changing the format of the retweet.
For instance, when my friend @breadcrumb12 tweeted:

BBC said that the International Committee of Red Cross will be scaling back significantly in North Sri Lanka http://bit.ly/141hnZ

A plain vanilla retweet would run over the 140 characters limit:

RT @breadcrumb12 BBC said that International Committee of Red Cross will be scaling back significantly in North Sri Lanka http://bit.ly/141hnZ

And no matter how much I love @breadcrumb12, I did not like the way this tweet was formatted. So, I’d like to re-use that link, while still giving due credit to @breadcrumb.

Try this:

RT ICRC scaling back significantly in Sri Lanka (BBC) http://bit.ly/141hnZ #aid (via @breadcrumb12)

Or

RT ICRC scaling back significantly in Sri Lanka (BBC) http://bit.ly/141hnZ #aid (Tnx @breadcrumb12)

Some use an even shorter version:

RT ICRC scaling back significantly in Sri Lanka (BBC) http://bit.ly/141hnZ #aid @breadcrumb12

If I want to retweet something, but want to include a comment of my own, I use something like this:

RT @breadcrumb12 ICRC scales back in Sri Lanka (BBC) http://bit.ly/141hnZ #aid [ed: leaves room for ethnic cleansing?]

5. Put some spank in your life tweets

If you use Twitter for your non-profit organisation, put some funny stuff or a personal message in between your ‘business tweets’.. It gives more of a personal twist to your tweets. There is nothing wrong with tweeting:

A busy day at work, working on a funding proposal for Zimbabwe school feeding.

Don’t hesitate to put a joke in the middle of serious business

Just saw a guy driving a motorbike on the highway with a dog on his lap

Or a picture of what you are doing at the moment:

http://twitpic.com/9rxn6 – Yesterday’s sunset view #Tuscany

Life is too short for business only. Put a bit of spank in your tweets. Your followers will love you for it, and it will show there is an actual person behind that Twitter-machine!

6. Interact with your followers

Twitter is all about social communities, so don’t use it to merely broadcast. Interact! Commend people on good tweets

@fighthunger nice find!

Or

@fighthunger thanks for your retweet!

And when people send you a direct message or a reply, respond! Nothing is as bad as to give people the impression you are a Twitter machine.

7. Ration your tweets

Twitter users who tweet continuously are seen as ‘noisy’, and often loose followers. Spread your tweets over time. Don’t overdo the amount of tweets you are broadcasting. Remember: quality masters over quantity.

8. Know when to tweet

Scheduling your tweets effectively is important. When you have important messages to tweet, make sure you tweet them, or re-broadcast them at peak times.
The most busy (and fertile) times on Twitter is when people arrive in the office between 8 and 10 am. As the main Twitter population lives in Europe and in the States, send out your important Tweets during those times, for the different time zones.

Weekends have low Twitter traffic. Statistics show there is a very low chance your important tweets will be picked up during the weekend.

In a future post, I will analyse the peak times and days so your tweets can be more effective.

9. Don’t just tweet links to your own website

Yes, Twitter can drive traffic to your website, and yes, I do tweet links to my own blogs actively. But I also tweet links to other websites and blogs I am reading. The world does not evolve around your blog or website alone!

Include links to interesting reads, controversial topics, and if you are tweeting on behalf of a non-profit organisation, also retweet what other organisations are tweeting. You will see that as time goes by, they will also retweet your tweets… After all, in the non-profit sector, we’re all in this together…

10. 140 characters of quality

Before you send out a tweet, re-read it. Check your spelling. Check the readability. Check the syntax. You are broadcasting newspaper headlines, so you have 140 characters to make mistakes. You have a space of 140 characters to show sloppiness or to show quality

In the next post, we tackle the most frequently asked questions when introducing Twitter in your organisation.

Additional reading:

- How to Re-Tweet
- 5 Steps for Better Tweeting
- Twitter best practices for Nonprofit Organisations

Cartoon courtesy Geek and Poke

This series all started from the basic question “How do you explain Twitter to someone who is completely ignorant about micro blogging and social media?”. We went through the moves of explaining the social networking side, what you can use Twitter for, the software components that make Twitter work, the technical syntax of tweets, and how to tweet effectively.
Often though, you will hear the same questions coming back. Here are some I am asked all the time:

1. Is Twitter one more tool to overload me with information?

There is no ‘have to’ with Twitter. Just like the Internet as a whole, you use Twitter as and when you like. All updates from the people you follow are optional reads. Some days I am pretty active on Twitter, other days I hardly touch it. Sometimes, I only use it to look up information…

2. How should we regulate the use of Twitter in our organisation?

If there would be one rule, it would be the same rule applying to any web presence of your organisation: If you have a guideline governing official web sites, your organisation’s blogs, or the official use of social media in general, then it can apply for Twitter too. If the Twitter account is in the name of the organisation, of course.
If the question is about people’s personal Twitter accounts, then most probably other guidelines apply, assuring the employee does not break any non-disclosure rules. Other than that, there is little an organisation can do and should do to regulate the use of Twitter.

3. Will Twitter replace Email?

Although Twitter has the possibility of sending public messages (“Replies”) or private messages to individual users, it is unsuitable as an Email system: You can only send a direct message to one person at a time, you are limited to 140 characters, there are no discussion threads, nor can you embed graphic elements etc…..
As with many features and possible uses of Twitter, users will define how they can and will use it. It won’t be long before new Twitter-ers will find out the difference between Email and Twitter for themselves.

4. Will Twitter replace Skype or other Instant Messengers?

Twitter is mainly used for ‘broadcasts’ of messages to your social community. Surely, you can use ‘replies’ and ‘direct messages’ to “kind of chat” using Twitter, but it is rather clumsy because of the 140 character limitation and the delays which occur in posting messages. In short: Twitter does not even come close to the functionality of an Instant Messenger.

5. Will Twitter take up a lot of my time?

As part of your official duties in your job, I’d say: ‘Twitter is optional’, use it up to the level where it fulfills a purpose in your job. For the rest, use Twitter as you see best fit. You can drive a Ferrari at 10 mph, but you can also race it over the German Autobahn. You can spend one minute per day on Twitter, and be happy with a social community of 10 people, or keep on going until… until you have a million followers.

6. I still don’t understand what to use Twitter for.

Even after explaining all the bits and pieces as we have done in this blog series, some people still don’t grasp what Twitter can do for them. My only – and final – advise is: Give it a try. If you don’t like it, forget all about it.
It took me a few months to figure out how to use Twitter for my own purposes, and hey, I am a social media freak.

Cartoon courtesy Geek & Poke