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But I don’t find Twitter that interesting !

This is one thing many of my friends say when I ask them to join Twitter or to be active on Twitter. I can understand that because that was my feeling initially. When I first heard of twitter I created an account and simply followed one or two people. I think @ManiKarthik (the SEO guy from Kerala) was the first one I followed. He posts a lots of updates daily and whenever I logged in to my Twitter I see a lot of updates from him  with that smiling avatar. So I didn’t find that interesting. But now I understand that there are lots of things that makes twitter to be the most amazing place to be online.

Twitter is the Simplest Social Networking out on the internet. Basically

  • You follow people and others follow you back.
  • You post updates (tweets), your followers see them.
  • You see the tweets of people you follow.
  • Others re-tweet your tweets, post replies or direct message you

Understanding the basic Twitter interface

twitter-interface

  • When you create a twitter account you get a unique profile address something like http://twitter.com/Nikpages (That’s my twitter profile :) )
  • When you log in to your twitter account you reach your Twitter Timeline it’s where you can post new tweets,see updates from your followers and of course your updates.
  • There is a question What are you doing ? and a text box below, that’s where you post your updates (tweets)
  • There is navigation bar at the top that includes links to your profile,search,settings,help etc.
  • There is a sidebar at the right side that includes links to replies to you, Direct Message, a search box and a lists of Trending topics.

Why should you follow people ?

  • So that they will follow you back :) . But seriously that’s how you build relationships in Twitter.
  • Then you follow those biggies who may be power Twitter users like @problogger or celebrities like @BarackObama, so that you get quality updates from them.
  • Then there are Twitter profiles for organizations like @CNN which you follow again for getting quality updates.

Understanding basic twitter terminologies

Replies (@nikpages)

You can reply to any twitter user by using the @ tag and his/her user name. For example

@nikpages Happy Birthday 2 u     (that is on 12th October ;) )

But you can use the @ replies in 2 ways. If you start the reply with the @username tag, it will be shown in the time line of people who follow both you and the person whom you replied (Hope I’m not confusing you)

But if you reply some thing like this

Hello @nadeemz Have a good day

That means you append a word (here hello) it will be displayed in the timeline of all those who follow you.

Retweet (RT)

If you find a tweet from any of your friend interesting you can re-tweet that ,similar to forwarding an email. You can do that by appending  RT and @username before the tweet. For example if you want to re-tweet a message from jubtho you can do that

RT @jubtho Delhi Dare Devils crashes out of IPL

Direct Message (D)

You can send a private message to any user by appending the tag D and user name  before your message and that can be seen only by the recipient.For example you can send a direct message to sanojck as

D sanojck This is a secret message hijk

You can access all direct messages to you using the direct message link in the  twitter sidebar.

# tags

You can use hash tags to specify that you tweet is related to a specific topic. For example during the India elections 09, every one used to tag their tweets related to elections as #indiavotes09 . Click here to search for messages with that tag. That explains it, you can search for a topic easily using the twitter search if the hash tags are used.

Twitter Tools

Desktop Twitter Clients – There are a lot of desktop twitter client that helps you use twitter directly from your desktop. I use TweetDeck, it’s a good one. You can download that and many more tools from http://twitter.com/downloads .

FriendOrFollow – This is a handy tool that can help you find the people you follow but they don’t follow you back or vice-versa.

Twubble – is another tool that helps you find people on Twitter. They scans your friend list and suggest new users for you.

URL shortening services – Twitter restricts the no of characters of your update to 140 . So you might not be able to tweet a very big url. In such cases you can use URL shortening services like tinyurl,tr.im,is.gd etc that gives you short urls that redirects to these long urls.

Customizing your twitter profile

Using you full name

This is important for people understanding that you are a real human and not a bot. If you don’t get your name  as your user name you should fill out your full name in your twitter profile. For example my username is nikpages but I’ve filled out my full name Nikhil George in my Twitter profile.

Changing twitter background

Apart from the default theme there are a couple of themes that you can access from Settings > Design. You can also change your theme colors or use a custom background image from there. Using a custom twitter background is a good idea to brand yourselves. There are a lots of tutorials creating custom twitter backgrounds, try searching for them.

You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Nikpages .

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