PC Mag has an article today regarding 10 Tips for Twitter Beginners. I’m a huge advocate and user of Twitter and I’ve tried valiantly to get my friends involved with the Twitter craze. Throw in the integration with services like Facebook and MySpace and you have a winner in my opinion.
Here’s a run-down of PC mag’s list of tips with my input on them:
Prerequisite: Tweet - Is the verb usage of making a micro-blog post on Twitter.com.
01. Shrink URLs – Use sites like tinyurl.com, is.gd, ow.ly and bit.ly to shrink URLs. Seeing as Twitter is a "micro-blogging" site that only allows 140 characters per post your space is limited. If you use a third party Twitter application (mentioned later) most of them integrate the URL shrinking for you.
02. ReTweeting – If you want to repost a Tweet someone else has made simply put RT @PersonsName before your post. Re-Tweeting is a way of both referencing the source of the Tweet and also helps that person make more friends on Twitter.
03. Direct Messages – DM’s (as people on Twitter abbreviate it) are simply 140 character private messages between users. You can only DM people following you.
04. @ Replies – If you want to reply or link to another user in your Tweet simply put @UserName. If you want to reply to a Tweet the built in reply function on Twitter.com will automatically fill in the @UserName for you. Many people also @UserName thanking new followers to help "spread the love." You can @UserName anyone on Twitter, they do not have to be following you.
05. Search – search.twitter.com allows you to search for people or topics on Twitter. The search function of Twitter has greatly improved over the past several months.
06. Tag/Categories – If you want to make your Tweet searchable via a category or tag (much like a blog) simply #categoryname, for instance if you want to be searchable for Obama put #Obama in your Tweet.
07. Share Pictures – Sites like TwitPic allow you to seamlessly share your photos with your Twitter followers. Many of the Twitter desktop and mobile applications (mentioned later) automatically integrate with these types of services. With TwitPic you can upload a picture directly from their URL that will automatically post to your Twitter account. For an example you can view my TwitPic account. TwitPic is the most widely known Twitter picture sharing service.
08. SMS Tweet – Twitter allows you to send Tweets from your phone for absolutely free. If you link your mobile number to your Twitter account (under settings) you can shoot instant Tweets by simply text messaging 40404 (for the US). Twitter also has added SMS support for other countries. There are mobile apps that work on most modern cell phones but they require a mobile data plan, so if you don’t want to pay for a data plan you can simply use the SMS option. The SMS option is also sometimes much faster than loading up your mobile Twitter app.
09. Desktop Clients – There are boatloads of Twitter desktop clients (for Mac, PC and Linux) available to make keeping up with your Twitter friends and updates easier. Some of the most popular are TweetDeck, Twhirl, Tweetr, Twitteroo, and TwitterFox. Mashable has a huge post with 140+ Twitter tools that is worth a look.
10. Mobile Clients – As mentioned, there are also clients that run on just about every mobile phone available including Blackberry (TwitterBerry), iPhone (TwitterRific/PocketTweets), Windows Mobile (TinyTwitter/Quakk/PocketTwit), Android (Twidroid) and Symbian (Java) based devices. Most of these applications integrate directly with your mobile phone and automatically allow you to send Tweets and pictures to share with your friends. I have personally used and would recommend TwitterBerry, PocketTweets and TinyTwitter, although you can get a complete mobile run-down here.
Happy Tweeting!
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