Tips Towards Twitter Mastery
The (relatively) new social network phenomenon Twitter is gaining users faster than ever. Certainly, there’s no lack of usage guides, but as one of the older users of the service (I was a user back when there were fewer than 100k of us), I’d like to throw a few tips of my own into the ether.
First, I will define a few terms:
Tweet (n) A message, no more than 140 characters, sent over the Twitter system. (v) To send a tweet.
Tweeter (n) A user of Twitter.
Twitterfeed (n) The incoming tweets from the tweeters you follow. syn. stream
Follower (n) Someone who has subscribed to see your tweets in their Twitterfeed.
Followeds (n) The tweeters you see in your Twitterfeed.
@reply (n) A tweet including with the character @ followed by your username, which shows up in your “@[yourname]” directory on the main page. (v) To send an @reply.
Twitterfriend (n) A person with whom you regularly correspond using @replies.
Retweet (n) A tweet beginning with RT, which contains a tweet tweeted by another tweeter than the one tweeting. (v) To repurpose someone else’s tweet into a tweet of your own by tweeting it, beginning with RT and including the name of the original tweeter.
Spammer (n) A tweeter who posts ‘junk’ tweets similar to spam e-mail.
Hash Tag (n) A mark at the end of a tweet, beginning with # and then a topic number, which is used to mark a post for aiding search-ability.
Twitterverse (n) All the tweets of all the tweeters
Twitter Search (n) http://search.twitter.com, a service which allows anyone to search the entire Twitterverse.
Now for the tips:
Tip #1: Manage your follow list with an iron fist
Because you see all the tweets coming down the stream, you can quickly become overloaded with information if you’re not careful. Follow your real friends, first and foremost. Don’t follow every celebrity you see, only the ones with tweets that specifically interest you. Keep your Twitterfeed personal. Don’t feel obligated to follow the same people as your friends. The best tweets will be retweeted, and you’ll see them anyway.
If one of your followeds starts crowding your stream, immediately unfollow them. Typically, that line for me is when the same user has more than three tweets in a row on my stream. If they can’t fit ten minutes of thought into 140 characters, they need to find a different medium than Twitter.
Tip #2: Check your replies and new followers constantly
One of the best ways to find new Twitterfriends is to look into your Replies directory, which shows you all tweets that are addressed to you, even those from outside your follow list. Maybe they saw your tweet from the main page, maybe they searched for a topic you mentioned, or maybe one of your tweets was retweeted. Either way, if someone thought enough of one of your tweets to reply, you should do them the service of reading it, and, more often than not, replying back.
Also, stay on top of your followers list. Unless you’re a bigtime celeb, you’re probably not getting more than a few new followers a week, and therefore it’s easy enough to pop in and see what’s up. If a new follower is a spammer, block them to keep your numbers from inflating. If they’re a friend, go ahead and automatically follow them. The grey list is Tweeters who you don’t yet know. Usually if one is in my geographical location, or the last page of tweets show topics I might be interested in, I’ll follow.
The key is to easily follow or unfollow. Don’t feel obligated to do either, but remember that you never know the gems until you see how their tweets fit into your stream. Think of Twitter as an open IM system. There are billions of conversations going on in the world, and you’re tapped into only the ones that (might) interest you. If you aren’t interested, stop following.
Tip #3: Use hash tags regularly
Hash tags are a fantastic way to find and be found by other tweeters. The one I use most often is #bsg, which taps me into a community of tweeters who are discussing Battlestar Galactica. If I say something interesting, a large group has seen it (through Twitter Search), and can reply. Often, you can find new tweetfriends this way. If you’re unsure if a particular hash is in use, plug it into Twitter Search and see if many tweets pop up. If not, try a few synonymous terms. If you can’t find anything, start using your own new hash tag. You never know, perhaps it will spread into wide use.
It’s good to have some of the hash tags you tweet often bookmarked for easy perusal. Wondering what the twitterverse thought of last night’s ‘Office’ episode? Just have ‘#office’ in Twitter Search bookmarked on your bar. Click it, and you’ll instantly see the thoughts of tweeters around the world.
P.S. you can follow me at http://twitter.com/gregoryharbin