Twitter for Dummies – part 4: The Geeky Art of 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
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Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, blogger, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. (
Thanks for the tip. Seeing the small numbers in Google analytics, i was thinking about removing the retweet button.
BTW, considering the enormous amount of you follow i follow crowd in the twitter, would people care to click those links
I don’t know if your retweet button shortens the URL with bit.ly, but -as described in this post- that could give you a black and white figure on the traffic the tweets give.
I do, on my links and have been astonished by the amount of traffic each tweet gives.
It is true there is a “scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours” mentality in the following in Twitter, but not so much in retweeting. At least not in the social community I have created around each of my Twitter accounts.
And maybe that is key in all of it: ensure the quality of your followers. Maybe one tip: I *never* autofollow. This means that “my” social community would never follow me, simply because I would follow back.
I’d like to say they follow my tweets, because they like the content
Hope that helps a bit,
Peter
I have just discovered your site via ICT-KM, and it will keep me busy for hours…. I have been blogging for a few months now, we are one of the NGOs who want to use social media more and are still finding out how best to do that (ILEIA, see http://www.leisa.info). So your site is full of useful stuff (so far I’d only found social media for marketing your business).. thanks and keep up the good work!
Karen
While these sites may be free for us, the end user, google and yahoo take the numbers we provide for them, and they scan the content we enter on their services, and use it as fodder to sell their profitable products, such as adwords.
It is in their interest to keep these sites working well, as the critical mass we provide is the very product they can leverage to advertisers.
That being said, Michael Keizer is correct- if the service is mission critical, buy the pro account, and get on the line with their support if needed.
Do you know of an alternative to Pipes?
@Hank:
Don’t think there is any pro-account formula for Yahoo Pipes unfortunately. The only alternative I found is http://pipes.deri.org/ but looks even more of a hackers tool, and I don’t know how well it performs.
I think I will make my own…
Peter.
i just love to Twitter everyday with my friends. Twitter is much better than blogging in my opinion and it is very addictive too.
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thank you for this good information
nice post . Very helpful information. Thank you.
Hi, this blog post is very well-written and appears extremely useful. But I was just wondering if you could clear something up? You mention Newsgator as a product, but the link to their website shows Newsgator is a company with a lot of products – it isn’t clear which tool or product you used to amalgamate feeds and produce script. Could you explain this step in some more detail?
If you post here please email me to let me know
Many thanks
Jez
Hi Jez,
You are totally correct. Newsgator changed their services end August. The online aggregator functions they used to have is no longer available.
If you are looking for a feed aggregator or RSS-to-script function, have a look at this post:
http://www.blogtips.org/free-rss-tools/
best,
Peter
i think the problem is solved now..
Yahoo Pipes went back up after almost 3 weeks of intermittent problems. There are still problems saving new or modified Pipes, though. That problem exists since at least 2 months….
Peter, thank you for including us in your review. I am happy you like the Dlvr.it service. Stay tuned. LOTS of good things coming. Including many more outputs – Facebook coming very soon.
Also, thanks for the feedback on the stats. In order to “provide interesting statistics,” mash the data and provide some real intelligence we use the Dlvr.it short URL. It makes the data consistent and allows us to do some interesting analysis – lots of things going on in the lab now.
Stay tuned…
Best,
Bill Flitter
Founder, dlvr.it
comprehensive post! Another tools for RSS to twitter is hootsuite, I havent tried it out.. but it gives the feature.
I just discovered Hootsuite’s RSS-to-Twitter function. Will try it out, and update the post.
Thanks for the reminder.
Peter
I agree I think social media is really more important for better communicating with your supporters and building a strong foundation and network of people interested in your cause.
These tips are great. Thanks for sharing.