Twitter For Newbies

Twitter has been around since 2006. I and a group of friends signed up in 2007 because we thought it would be fun.

Back then, Twitter was easy to “get” because there weren’t a lot of users yet, which allowed the service to send updates via SMS to your followers for free. So in those days, nobody really had any trouble understanding what Twitter was: A cheap way to send text messages to your blog buddies while dicking around the internet.

But thanks to the iPhone, the Blackberry, and Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s audience is growing at a geometrical rate. With this large influx of users, Twitter had a hard time keeping up so it disabled a few features like free SMS updates for some regions (read: ours), and as a result we got a lot of people who sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return.

For most of these people, the reason why they never come back is they never really got what it was for. Twitter’s front page explains it as :

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Sounds easy enough, until you realize “Wait, what friends? I ain’t got no followers!” Well that’s actually normal. We all started out that way.

Getting Started

So you signed up for Twitter. What now?  Well the first thing I would advise is to lurk a little more. Wait, scratch that. The first thing you need to do is find people to follow. Of course, following celebrities is pretty obvious, and that’s ok, you can start with them. But Twitter is much more than finding out where Miley Cyrus has her hair cut. If you’re interested in photography, sports, or politics, simply do a Twitter search and you’ll eventually end up with people with interesting updates on any given topic. You might also want to check out Twitter’s Suggested Users list.

Twitter would also be more fun if some of your friends got on board. If you’re like us who joined Twitter at pretty much the same time, then this shouldn’t be a problem. You’ve already got a captive audience and you won’t feel like such a dork for talking to yourself all the time.

But what about those who don’t have have friends on Twitter yet? This is what I recommend to newbies (even though it’s something I discourage for veterans) : Sync your tweets with your Facebook statuses (statusii? statuses? a conglomeration of status?). I’m assuming here that you have a Facebook account (remember, if you’re not on Facebook, you don’t exist), and have a decent number of friends. There’s your captive audience right there.

There are several ways of doing this, but here’s the easiest:

1. Install the Twitter Facebook application.
2. Login to the application with your Twitter credentials.
3. When that’s done, you’ll be able to see your Twitter timeline. On the upper right hand corner of the screen, you’ll see a button that says “Allow Twitter to Update your Facebook Status”
4. Click on it and you’re good to go.

Lurking

“So I gots me my captive audience? Do I start telling them what I had for breakfast now?”

DON’T. In Twitter, as is true for any social circle, it is proper to observe first before jumping in. Get a feel of how things work, and note what people find interesting. It is also important to observe how people with a lot of followers talk to get an idea what kind of tweets most people like.

For further reading, you may want to go through this: 14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely.

What @replies Are & How They Work

@replies are a Twitter function to let you know whenever somebody mentions you or want to send you a reply. You can see @replies from people even though you’re not following them. This is what allows celebrities (or people with a high followers to following ratio) to get messages from their fans.

How it works is you simply type @ + <Twitter username> then the recipient will see it when they check out their replies / mention. (ie. typing @Pimplepopper will tell me how much you love me)

It may be interesting to note that @replies != Direct Messages. @replies can be seen on the timeline of the sender while DMs can be seen by the sender and recipient only.

Twitter Apps

Twitter’s web interface is fine, but when you’ve been Tweeting for quite a while, you might want to be able to follow your timeline more effectively without having to hit “Refresh” every 30 seconds.

Here’s a short list of Twitter 3rd party apps I recommend:

• Twitterfox – This is a Firefox Extension that displays your Twitter timeline on the lower right corner of your Firefox window. Lightweight and easy to use, and it has some of the basic functions you need in a twitter client (notifications, URL shortener, retweet, etc.)
• Twhirl – Runs on Adobe Air, and looks sexier than Twitterfox. It has all of Twitterfox’s features, but does a better job at executing them. If you’re following around 50-100 people, then this is all you need. It was my favorite Twitter client before moving on to Tweetdeck.
• Tweetdeck – If you’re following more than 200 people, most of whom like to update regularly, keeping up with their updates can be daunting. This is where Tweetdeck makes your life easier. It allows you to group your contacts according to your needs (ie. I have the following groups on my Tweetdeck: News, Entertainment, Funny People, Photographers, Celebrities). It lets you upload photos to Twitpic, shorten your URL, twitter search, show you the latest Twitter Trends, and so much more.  You can also post your updates to Facebook. If only this client would include the option to post updates to Ping.fm then it would be complete.

I’d also like to mention TwitZap for those who don’t want to install anything. It’s just like Twitter’s web interface, but with automatic refreshing.

Final Words

I guess that’s pretty much it for now. I hope what I wrote points you in the right direction on how to start using Twitter.

Hopefully with this working knowledge, you can figure out such things as retweets, hashtags, and trending topics on your own.

Before I let you go, one final reminder: keep your tweets interesting. Twitter would be a much more beautiful place if there were less “I just washed my hair” tweets. Filter your tweets, try to ask yourself “would somebody find this interesting or at least informative?” If the answer is no, then don’t tweet it, or at least rephrase it in a way to make it more interesting.

And lastly, if you’ve tried Tweeting for a couple of days, and you’re still not seeing any value in doing it, then it’s OK to quit. Despite what Twitter’s membership numbers say, it’s not for everyone. There’s no shame in walking away.