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Twitter For Dummies
Published:
December 31, 2014
Overview
A fully updated new edition of the fun and easy guide to getting up and running on Twitter
With more than half a billion registered users, Twitter continues to grow by leaps and bounds. This handy guide, from one of the first marketers to discover the power of Twitter, covers all the new features. It explains all the nuts and bolts, how to make good connections, and why and how Twitter can benefit you and your business.
- Fully updated
to cover all the latest features and changes to Twitter
Using Twitter is fun and surprisingly easy. It doesn’t matter where you access Twitter, — on Twitter.com, or on a desktop or mobile app on your smartphone. You can quickly navigate the Twitterverse with just a few commands. Even Twitter etiquette is straightforward and simple. Before you know it, you’ll be sending Tweets and following on Twitter like an expert.
About The Author
Laura Fitton was one of the first marketers to discover the value of Twitter for businesses and society. She founded Twitter app store oneforty.com and sold it to HubSpot. She’s now Inbound Marketing Evangelist for Hubspot. Anum Hussain speaks to thousands on how to effectively use social media - in classrooms, at conferences and even alongside Twitter’s Small Business Team. Brittany Leaning writes about social media strategy for HubSpot’s 1.6 million readers and has managed accounts for several well-known brands.
Articles From The Book
3 results
Articles
You can use Twitter for much more than keeping up with your friends and family. Whether you use it to stay on top of your industry, breaking news, or tidbits from your favorite shows and celebrities, Twitter has many cool and diverse uses. The possibilities are endless.
Socialize and network
The most engaged people on Twitter largely use it to keep up with their various social and business circles.
Articles
You need the right tools to get the most out of Twitter. New tools, services, websites, and applications are created for Twitter users every day, so the list of tools that you can choose among is always growing.
Popular new tools emerge all the time, and, of course, the best tool for you really depends on your needs.
Articles
One of the best ways to gain a following on Twitter is by posting engaging media such as photos, Vine videos, long-form videos from YouTube or Vimeo, or even PowerPoint presentations on Slideshare. These visuals show up much bigger in the Twitter feed, compared to a text-based Tweet, and jump out and catch people's eyes.
Articles
Most users know how to set up and navigate the Twitter interface, make connections, tweet interesting content, use the latest shortcuts, and even promote your business or cause. That should make you a pro, right? Well, the thing is, Twitter is continually changing to adapt to its fast-paced, technology-loving users.
Articles
Getting started on anything new is hard. Twitter can seem tricky or mysterious simply because you don’t know quite how to begin to get yourself up and running. Here are ten basic Tweets you can send right now to get on your feet.
Say hello
You can try it now, if you want to. Just pull up any tweeting interface and write
Hello, world!
Articles
Done well, getting to know new people is the absolute best part of Twitter. Because it's so important, here are ten ways to do this right.
One of the best things about Twitter is how easy it is to approach people you do not already know. Done poorly, this is also one of the worst things about Twitter, because it means it's possible to annoy people.
Articles
When you first start using Twitter, it may seem daunting. But the truth is, whether you were among the first to join the social network or just now jumping on board, almost everyone starts as a Twitter newbie.
In March 2014, Twitter celebrated its eighth birthday by launching a tool that allows users to see their very first Tweets and even share their first Tweet with the trending hashtag #FirstTweet.
Articles
Twitter is a social networking platform with unique ways to engage with your network. As such, terms used to describe actions you can take on Twitter may not be in your usual vocabulary. This brief overview of these digital terms may help.
Task
Command
@mention
By placing the @ symbol in front of a username, you can tag
another user in your Tweet.
Articles
Twitter etiquette isn't only about what you should do. Unfortunately, bad Tweets and poor Twitter practices sometimes show up within microblogging communications. Although you can't really go horribly wrong on Twitter, you'll make your life easier in the Twitterverse if you follow these guidelines:
When you first sign up and before you start tweeting regularly, don't follow hundreds of people.
Articles
The Twitterverse doesn't have many rules, but there's such a thing as Twitter etiquette. Writing Tweets of 140 characters or fewer isn't the only guideline. Your experience on Twitter will be a positive one if you keep the following tips in mind:
Say what you think or are doing.
In general, keep Tweets longer than one word so that your followers can understand you.
Articles
Through conversations on Twitter, tens of thousands of smaller communities have cropped up. The Twitter-based community occasionally organizes meetups in real life — the common thread being that they’re all part of a community from Twitter. As with nearly every term relating to Twitter, it should come as no surprise that these meetups are sometimes referred to as tweetups.
Articles
In addition to changing your avatar on Twitter, you can change the background of your home screen from the default to another color or pattern. You can even upload an image of your choice (or do both).
You can tile an image (make it repeat, like tiles on a floor), make an image large enough to cover the entire background, or choose a smaller image that doesn’t cover the entire background and leaves a solid color behind it.
Articles
Your header photo is the large image displayed on the top of your Twitter profile. This large image welcomes people to your personal profile and illustrates a bit more about you that maybe you couldn’t fit into your 160-character bio. Many people use this space to showcase a picture of a place or cause they identify with, an extracurricular activity they enjoy, or something else that demonstrates what they’re passionate about.
Articles
Many of the photos that you want to use for your Twitter avatar may include other people whom you want to crop out, or the picture composition just may not allow you to get a good head shot. Fortunately, both Macs and PCs have tools that let you put together a profile photo quickly without needing third-party photo-editing software.
Articles
Twitter is a very receptive environment for forging connections with new friends and contacts, so amassing a list of followers is relatively simple. Typically, you gain followers in the natural course of using Twitter, but here are a few guidelines to follow:
Be real. Being genuine goes a long way, and you’re likely to gain followers without even trying.
Articles
Twitter’s open API allows software developers to create applications, mashups, and services that feed off the Twitter platform. Many of these third-party applications are Twitter clients — programs designed to let you update Twitter on your mobile phone instead of having to use the web interface or text messaging.
Articles
When you sign up for Twitter, you’re prompted to check whether your friends are also on Twitter on the Find Friends screen. Finding contacts on Twitter can be a lot of fun!
The easiest way to find your friends is to import your friends and contacts from other services that you already use (such as Gmail, Yahoo!
Articles
Because of the frequency and personal nature of what people share on Twitter, any twitterer absolutely must be genuine and real, whether she’s representing a business or tweeting as an individual. Joining Twitter as a private citizen is the route many users take, even if they have business to promote.
Twitter is ideally suited for personal connection, and you can often more easily make yourself accessible and personable when you use Twitter as a person, not as your business.
Articles
Twitter itself has a few ways to measure your Tweets. You have following and followers counts. Although those numbers would seem to provide a good baseline for understanding how far your updates go and to whom, they don’t say much about what types of people follow you and how influential those followers are. It also doesn’t show how many people your followers follow.
Articles
If you represent a company that has something to sell, you can find a unique home on Twitter. You may need to adjust your messages a bit so that you can shift from a hard-sell philosophy to an attitude of interaction and engagement that doesn’t necessarily follow a direct path to a sale.
But after you find and flip that switch from “talking at” to “talking with” potential customers, people on Twitter can interact with and respond to your company’s information ideas and products in ways that often lead to benefits for both sides.
Articles
Don’t forget that a huge benefit of Twitter is making offline connections with people you may not meet otherwise. If you’ve begun meeting other users with similar interests and want to get to know them in real life, consider hosting a tweetup.
A tweetup is a way to meet up with Twitter friends (and strangers) in real life.
Articles
If you’re in any way in the business of creating, whether it’s art, music, film, photography, or what-have-you, Twitter can become a home away from home. Twitter users are incredibly receptive to creative people who tweet.
Just ask Miley Cyrus (@MileyCyrus). The former teen idol turned racy pop singer had a childish image.
Articles
In the early days of Twitter, it was commonplace for people not to just reply to Tweets they liked, but to forward that Tweet on to their own followers by simply copying the text in the original Tweet and pasting it in a new Tweet. This practice grew to be known as retweeting (RT for short) and was so popular that Twitter built that functionality directly into their interface.
Articles
Similar to the content you see on many social media sites, you may see something on Twitter that you want to see again. You will likely have a favorite tweet that you want to find and revisit at some point. Here’s how.
Revisiting Your Favorite Tweets
One of the icons that appear on Twitter when you hover your mouse over a particular Tweet is the star icon, or Favorites button.
Articles
You can search for people on Twitter itself many ways. The simplest is by using the search field — look for the magnifying-glass icon and the words Search Twitter inside an oval — present in the navigation bar at the top of every Twitter page. Run your search using any name, keyword, industry, title, and so on, and then look for a link in the left navigation bar to the People subset of results in that search.
Articles
It’s fairly simple to opt in to receiving Twitter via text messages (SMS delivery). First, you have to set up a mobile device so that Twitter knows where to send your Tweets. To do so, follow these steps:
Click the gear icon in the top-right corner of your Twitter.com home screen.
Click Settings in the drop-down menu.
Articles
If you have a new or growing company that you want to introduce to the world through Twitter, start a separate account for the company. You may find balancing traditional corporate professionalism with the level of transparency that Twitter users have come to expect to be a little tricky sometimes, so keep these guidelines in mind when you start your new account:
Provide value to the Twitter community.
Articles
Not every Twitter account is written. Quite a few really useful Twitter accounts are automated bots (short for robots) that publish Tweets that have never touched human hands. At first, this sounds kind of awful, but there are some great reasons for doing this.
Want to be among the very first to know when there is earthquake activity near San Francisco, California?
Articles
For the first seven years of Twitter’s existence, users dictated how the social network was used to help the world. After it became a popular channel for disseminating critical information — such as during the 2011 Hurricane Irene or 2012 Hurricane Sandy — Twitter decided to invest in building its own tools.
In September 2012, the Twitter team launched “Lifeline” in Japan.
Articles
With many web services, signing up is the easiest part of an otherwise-complicated process. With Twitter, using the site is just as easy as signing up. To sign up for a Twitter account, follow these steps:Use your web browser to navigate to the Twitter website.Twitter website.">The Twitter splash screen appears.
Articles
Like every social network, Twitter has its own set of optimal dimensions, so not every photo you upload to Twitter will appear properly in your friends’ feeds. Although networks currently thrive on perfect square photos, Twitter’s perfect photo is more horizontal.
By uploading your photos through the Twitter mobile app, you’ll be able to crop your photo to the horizontal frame that works best in a user’s feed.
Articles
By default, Twitter sends you an email every time someone follows you. This is a useful starting point for finding people to follow because there’s likely a reason why he followed you in the first place. It may be because he knows you, or it may be because he thinks you’re a good person to follow.
No matter what, it’s nice to know when someone’s following you.
Articles
How do you credit a source on Twitter or assure people that the news you tweet is accurate? As much as possible, offer proof that your news is valid. Here’s how:
Include a link. The most basic thing you can do is link to a reliable source or, if you can’t verify, post the item as a question, asking others to share verification.
Articles
Twitter isn’t just a network for photo uploads. It’s a media site that’s capable of much more, such as video. As of 2012, an estimated 700 million YouTube videos were being shared on Twitter every minute, an astonishing rate which has dramatically increased since.
On top of that you will see Vines, Facebook videos, Instagram and other kinds of videos, and now Hyperlapses, and you can see that video sharing is an incredibly popular use of Twitter.
Articles
While your Twitter universe grows and grows, you probably want to find the best way possible to keep up with your followers and the people you’re following. For some reason, Twitter doesn’t offer a way to search your follower or following lists. It also doesn’t offer a way to sort your followers alphabetically or navigate in any way more efficient than a slow page-by-page scan.
Articles
Hashtags have become part of the core culture of Twitter for many avid users. Basically, hashtags are a way to delineate a keyword that people can use to organize discussions about specific topics and events. Originally, the website Hashtags automatically tracked and displayed these hashtags. But Twitter occasionally turns off the portion of its API that the Hashtags site uses, so you can’t always search it reliably.
Articles
Twitter is a place to take advantage of breaking industry news that could benefit your business. Author David Meerman Scott calls this newsjacking, a way to inject your ideas into a breaking news story and garner business from it. He even wrote an entire book on it, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, 4th Edition.
Articles
Topsy is a search engine that stores a comprehensive index of Tweets — as its site says, “all Tweets since 2006.” A Twitter certified partner, Topsy behaves a lot like Google Search for Twitter. Using the tool is quite simple. Follow these steps:
Type a keyword query in the search bar.
Topsy swiftly gives you the results.
Articles
At its best, Twitter can do an incredible job as a support system for your support system. That is, by keeping you connected in real time with the people in your support system, you are better able to rely on them when you have a request for help or want to give back in appreciation.
Many users instinctively turn to their Twitter network when they need to commiserate over a loss by their favorite sports team, when they get a promotion or a new job, when they lose a loved one, or when anything else happens that they want to share with a supportive network of people.
Articles
If you have a solid network of Twitter friends, someone can likely answer your question. Have you ever had a seemingly simple question that you can’t answer with Google and that has bothered you for days and days? People tend to know a variety of things, or have unknown talents and knowledge bases, so go ahead and ask!
Articles
If you plan events — whether they’re small, impromptu meetups or large weekend workshops or seminars — Twitter can help. You can use Twitter to find speakers, scout locations, score discounts, locate equipment, and drive attendance.
Here’s how you can make the most of Twitter for your event:
Create a landing page.
Articles
Politicians took to Twitter as a means to connect with their constituents and, um, converse (sometimes it gets pretty shrill and hostile) with their fellow politicians quite slowly at first. Those days are long gone. Twitter is now a major outlet for politicians at all levels, including at least 80 percent of world leaders.
Articles
See who’s interacting with you on Twitter directly through @replies and @mentions (Tweets in response to or generally mentioning individual users), favorites (ways to positively acknowledge or bookmark Tweets), and retweets (sharing content that has already been posted by another Twitter user).
Favorites
Clicking the star icon, or Favorites button, adds that Tweet to your Favorites list.
Articles
Every Twitter user — new and old — has fallen victim to confusion between @reply versus @mention. When growth marketer and content strategist Anum Hussein presented her 21 social media posting tips at the annual INBOUND conference, her tip for understanding the difference between the @reply and @mention was by far was the number one tip.
Articles
Twitter was originally popular for helping individuals keep in touch with their friends and acquaintances through mini updates. Many personal Twitterers still tend to use Twitter in this manner, updating a close circle of friends about thoughts and happenings in their lives. Over time, you can keep up with people you otherwise might not contact often and even make new friends.
Articles
Above all else, remember that Twitter is a public forum. Even when you’re talking to your trusted Twitter network, your Tweets are very much public; Google and other search engines still index them, and anyone on the web can link to them.
You can adjust your settings to prevent search engines and the occasional passerby from viewing your updates by protecting your account.
Articles
One way many people use Twitter is to spread news or breaking stories. If you hope to be part of this movement, you can use these tools to prepare for your Twitter-inspired citizen-journalist moment:
A mobile phone that has a camera and/or video camera: Most cellphones have at least the former these days. And make sure that you have a cellular data plan so you can send your photos.
Articles
Using Twitter is fun and surprisingly easy. It doesn’t matter where you access Twitter, — on Twitter.com, or on a desktop or mobile app on your smartphone. You can quickly navigate the Twitterverse with just a few commands. Even Twitter etiquette is straightforward and simple. Before you know it, you’ll be sending Tweets and following on Twitter like an expert.
Articles
Twitter isn't just for computer users. You can access Twitter from your iOS, Android, or other mobile device with Internet access. If you don't have a smartphone, you can even text Tweets from any cellphone with SMS capabilities. All you need to know is the right Twitter access point.
Here's a list of the places where Twitter is available to you.