I hated social networks or The Beginners Guide to Twitter

I had no great desire to join Twitter, in fact I resisted for quite some time. I was expecting the usual social-type network trying to pair me with people I possibly attended school with in grade 6. I happen to have been in school in different countries so that really doesn’t help me anyway.

To make a long story short, I finally joined Twitter and am now delighted I did! Although Twitter doesn’t have too steep a learning curve, there are somethings I wish I had known when I joined. So here is my list of Twitter Tips which I think will help you along your Twitter flight. Add your own tips to the comments below. Enjoy!

Some things I have observed about Twitter (and turn into Tips for you):

Short names are easier for others. With only 140 characters, the less room the name takes up, the better. This becomes noticeable later when people “retweet” (see below) your messages or recommend you on Fridays.

Real names and a personal photo (icon) are much more social or friendly and easier to remember.

Since I am looking for people within my area(s) of interest, I check each profile. If there is no profile, I am obviously less interested in following them. If the background colors make it difficult (sometimes impossible) to read the profile, I will often skip them. And if the profile is a list of abbreviations I don’t understand, I will also tend not to follow them. After a while, it has become easier to guess whether the person is really here for social networking based on the profile. Some profiles just do not sound honest at all. But if the profile seems to be an honest attempt to explain what they are doing, interested in or selling, I will tend to click “follow”.

When I want to follow people, there are several items I watch for:

1) I am trying to follow people in my own area of interest. In my case, I am interested to find Christians on Twitter. However, I certainly don’t mind following people who know how to communicate or have expertise or interesting products to sell. I am not interested in folk telling me how to get 16000 Twitter followers (especially since they usually have only a few hundred followers). Just glancing at the top five or so messages gives me an idea if they are real or just trying to get high numbers and/ or spam me.

2) I check the statistics quickly: Did they post a message recently? Did they post enough messages? If they only have five or fewer messages, I generally will not follow them. Are the other statistics on an even balance? Most “celebrities” may have 320,000 followers but follow only 10 or so back. Obviously I am not likely to become the 11th person they follow. However, if people follow 2500 and have 2300 following them, this indicates to me they are likely to be interested in following me back. But again, if they have only posted five or ten messages but have quite high following/er numbers, they are probably not much interested in looking at my profile nor reading any messages at all. (Note: if they are following 2001 but have significantly fewer followers, they can’t follow back anyway. 2000 is one of a few anti-spam threashold built into Twitter.)

3) And lastly, I tend to shy away from people who too many messages. Having said that, I have made a few good friends here on Twitter who post a lot. However, they are usually writing to friends and they are not filling up my message stream with junk.

What people post is equally important:

Most of you have read the following many times, so I’ll just make a very brief summary again:

I am looking for people who post a balance of:

• @replies (replies to other people)
• RT (retweets) since this shows they are reading messages in their stream (the updates look like this: “RT @originator_of_message cool message I want my followers to see”).
• Links to articles or blogs or whatever since the link is of interest to us all.
• #hashtags since that gives me ideas of what is going on plus shows me their interests.
• Some personal messages (10% at the most). I certainly don’t mind the “I’m tired now, off to bed” nor the “Good morning, where’s the coffee?” type messages. However, when I first started on Twitter there was one guy who only wrote about how tired or terrible he felt. I wondered if I could help and replied several times but I never got a response. After a few days I unfollowed him. I also followed a ministry I know well. However, they had added an automatic application which posted every Google search they made. There were hundreds per day. I unfollowed my dear friends quickly as well.
• Tips or insights: (which usually generate the most RT’s) are always helpful, but again, everything in moderation.
• Photos, video and document links: you can use applications to upload a variety of documents, not just text. See the links at the bottom of this article for details.

More details about the sidebar:

a) On your sidebar (on the right-hand side) you will see your photo (icon), name, and the statistics I mentioned above. Clicking Following and Followers will show you slightly different options, check them out. Clicking Updates can be very helpful at times when you are keeping up a conversation with several people and forget what you wrote to whom. Note that with all three of these options you need to click Home to get back to your default screen.

b) Your next sidebar area is a Twitter message which tells you about helpful or new applications.

c and d) Next comes the Home link and just underneath it @your_name. Click @your_name to find out who has replied to you or mentioned you in a message. NOTE: just because they have @replied or mentioned you does not guarantee you are following them. Click their name to check.

e) Next comes the Direct Messages or DM’s. There are many opinions on whether this is useful or not. DM’s are simply messages you send to someone which do not appear in the stream (the messages on the left of the sidebar). I would probably use DM’s more if there were some way to tag them or organize them better. I do have them emailed to me (an option under Settings) where I can sort them into 1) messages to me personally, 2) automatic messages which are useful to me 3) messages with links which I do click periodically and 4) the rest – an archive of those who bothered to DM me.

I have made several very useful contacts thanks to DM’s, but I admit, again since I can’t filter them nor tag them, sometimes they are just overwhelming. (There are bots or robots which work with DM, I give you a link near the bottom.)

Auto DM’s: Many people do not like automatic direct messages which come automatically when we follow someone, but when I started with Twitter I received a few auto DM’s like, “New here? check this article >> link.htm”. I will be forever thankful for those DM’s. They saved me so much time by linking me to some great tips and articles about Twitter. So I personally have nothing against automatic DM’s, in fact, I use them myself. I am using a free service called Tweetlater.com which works great for me. TweetLater even allows me to purge my DM folder whenever I want which saves a lot of time. And since I still receive a copy of all activity via email, I don’t need to keep the DM’s in my Twitter account.

f) Moving on down our sidebar, we see the Favorites link. I confess I often forget about this, however, if you hover over a message in your Stream, a star will appear (on the right) which you can click. Now, click the sidebar Favorites link and you will see you just added a favorite message. I sure wish this was true of DM’s as well… .

g) Next of course is Search where you can search for people, trends, #hashtags and so on using wildcards. If you are not satisfied with the results, you can also try search.twitter.com (at the very bottom of the Twitter screen).

h) Then we have Trending Topics. This is constantly updated to show you what topics are hot right now. Try it, click something that either interests you or something you don’t understand. Note the # sign before a word indicates a ‘hashtag’ which is just a special tag to make searching faster and easier. You can close or re-open Trending Topics by clicking the appropriate arrow on the right of the TT title.

i) Next comes Following, again which you can open or close. This gives you a mini-icon representation of 36 of your recent friends (and differs slightly from the icons when you first login). It used to be showing (open) by default but obviously the icons slow down your browser and thus Twitter. If you are still on an older Twitter server, it may be you still see the icons by default but that will eventually disappear.

j) And lastly is the RSS feed. You can add anyone’s feed to see updates in your browser – it all works the same as any website, blog, forum RSS feed (in case there is anyone left in the world who still uses RSS).

Just before I move on, don’t forget that at the bottom of the page are some internal Twitter links including search and their blog / status etc which often posts important information or updates or changes Twitter has implemented.

Software applications:

Look at your Stream and under each message you will see the time, date and from … message. The from might read, Web, TweetDeck, Twirl, txt, Tweetberry or whatever. This tells you how people are posting their messages. There are lot’s of applications out there; for your phone, for your PC and so on. I personally use TweetDeck when I want to converse with people. It allows me to put my friends into groups so I can find them easier. However, I am told most of the PC applications are more or less the same, so the choice is going to be yours. My guess is all those using Adobe Air are going to be quite similar, but I haven’t tried the others, so I’ll leave it up to you.

Helpful Twitter Tools:

This is what you have been waiting for right? These are some very helpful links to get you started. They are not in any order of importance.

Twellow.com >> A large directory of people using Twitter. You can add yourself to several categories which best describe your interests and area of expertise. I strongly recommend you add yourself not too long after you join Twitter, but probably not right away. TIP: Login to view the nice graphics of who you already follow and if they follow you.

WeFollow.com >> A user-powered Twitter directory, not so detailed as Twellow, but good nonetheless.

Twitter Fan Wiki >> Here you will find an excellent list of practically everything relating to Twitter. For example, you will find a listing of applications (Apps for short) for your PC [ie TweetDeck] or iPhone, or an explanation about what #Hashtags are or interesting “Bots” (robots) you can run via DM (direct messaging) to make your DM experience fun, fascinating and useful.

The Twitter Fan Wiki isn’t the only list of its type on the Internet, but it is a great place to get you started.

Some of my personal favorite Twitter helpers:

FriendorFollow.com >> This allows you to clean up your following vs followers lists, but more importantly, you can download the CSV files to your computer giving you a backup of your followers. It is usually very fast.

http://twitter.polldaddy.com/ >> Want to create Polls on Twitter? I personally like Polldaddy.

bit.ly or tinyurl.com >> “Shorten, share and track your links”. You only have 140 characters to explain what you are doing, so adding a link like http://my_great_link.com/_insights_into_what_i_am_doing_right_now/exactly_this_second_on_twitter.html won’t work!. Use a link shortner such as http://bit.ly or http://tinyurl.com (already built into some applications such as TweetDeck by the way).

Analysis >> self analysis of how you are using twitter may surprise you. There are lots of applications out there, I found twitter analyzer.com to be helpful, but there are many. Basically these will help you see if you are keeping a good balance of your tweets (messages) between replies, RT’s, info, links etc. The more interesting you can make yourself on Twitter will eventually determine who and yes, how many people are interested in following you.

Twitpic.com >> A hassel-free way to put photos into your Twitter Stream.

(Please search “add video on twitter” for appropriate applications. I know http://www.bubbletweet.com/ works but haven’t used it personally so I don’t want to push it nor link to something I haven’t tried …)

In Summary

In summary, the most helpful tip I read about using Twitter was, “Enjoy!” I am indeed enjoying using Twitter, it’s the most fun I have had on the Internet for some time now.
* And the truth is, it is also helpful to me. I have added quite a bit of traffic to my websites just by writing informative tweets about certain links.
* And since I don’t delete my original tweets (updates) I know they are also being indexed on Google! Quite cool.
* Plus I have been able to work with teams easier and faster using Twitter than via e-mail.
* And most importantly, I have met a great bunch of people who have added so much to my life thanks to Twitter.

Enjoy it, use it, but please don’t abuse it.

See you on twitter. http://twitter.com/30dp

PS. Please add your own experiences, links or desires below. Sp@m-type comments will be deleted of course.

PPS. Here is my “What I learned about Twitter” article, many tweet me it was helpful. Enjoy.

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