1,2,3, Twitter

Tagged as: beginners, micro-blogging, Social Media, Tips, Twitter

This is the first dedicated Twitter article to be published on SteitBlog, and since it’s the first I will be targeting it to those who do not know what Twitter is and what we use it for. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform based on users answering the single question using 140 characters: “What are you doing now?”. Users can submit their tweets (updates) through different platforms and devices.

Today, as mentioned earlier, my article is going to be targeted to those who have not yet started using Twitter or those who are on Twitter but do not know how it all works. I hope after reading this article, anyone could at least create a minimal knowledge that will allow her/him to start using Twitter and interact with others efficiently.

1- Follow: Twitter’s concept is built on a two side friends list; followers and followings. Once you login to your account, you can easily choose to follow people you are interested in and knowing what they are up to, in the contrary you will find people following you in order to know what you are up to. When you follow someone and you start getting her/his updates, it doesn’t mean that she/he will be getting yours unless they are following you back.

2- Un-Follow: Simply to unfollow someone means to stop getting their updates, and this happens whenever you find out that someone is using their account for spamming purposes or any annoying usage.

3- Tweet: A tweet is basically your update message which consists of 140 characters or less and could contain a link to an interesting article, your blog or site, picture (twitpic and yfrog), music (blip.fm), videos (Twitvid), #Hashtag or anything you could ever think about.

4- @: This character is used when you want to alert another user, notify them or reply back to a tweet by them. When having a tweet with your @username it is called “mention” meaning people are mentioning you within their tweet. For example, if you want to draw my attention to your tweet, you have to add @steitiyeh to it.

5- RT: An RT is when a user thinks that a tweet is beneficial and would like to share it with her/his followers. The formula of an RT is “RT @username: tweet”. Personally, I RT my friends’ tweets, I RT breaking news, I RT whatever I think is beneficial to my followers.

6- # or HashTag: It’s when you add the hash symbol (#) before a word or a phrase to a conversation. For example, I use #SteitBlog in all my tweets which refers to my personal blog. One popular Hashtag is #FollowFriday this is used when tweeps from around the world recommend different tweeps to be followed by all of their followers every Friday. Basically a HashTag could be used to track a conversation or to stay updated about a certain topic.

7- DM: Which stands for Direct Message which is a feature from Twitter that enables all users to send private messages to those who are following them. This is very important to know, in order to be able to DM a user, he should be following you, other wise you won’t be able to DM them.

8- Tweeps: Is a noun that means Twitter users, or people on Twitter. You may find tweets saying: Hello Tweeps, Good morning Tweeps, what are you up to today Tweeps, etc…

9- Twitter Stream: Your Twitter Stream is your homepage which could be found on http://twitter.com/username and where you can find all of the recent tweets from your followings. Every user has a different Twitter Stream depending on his list of followings.

10- Public Stream: The public stream is the same for all Twitter users, where all tweets from all of the users on Twitter can be found in real-time.

Are you facing difficulties with Twitter that are not mentioned in this article? Please feel free to share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.

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