The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Twitter: For friends to understand, become interested, and tweet seriously
Warning: No making huge bling-bling money with Twitter in this post.
Please note that this work is based on my personal experience. I do not pretend to synthesize a complete and exhaustive analysis about Twitter, neither do I know the perfect tools or ways of using it. If I come up with something new, I may update this post or write new ones about the subject.
Let’s get to the topic. With so many people in my living environment not getting the point about Twitter, I thought some explanations could be useful. You can RT this post if you like, or share it with friends who are in the same “what the frak?” situation you were maybe in when you began tweeting.
Everything I state in this post has a good chance to look obvious to most people who already tweet a lot. They may not learn much from it.
I think that a more community oriented approach is likely to explain things better than the usual bling-bling business oriented approach you can find on many How to begin Twitter tutorials. Nonetheless, I will explain the common business approach as well, just so that you can understand some patterns. Also, though I review the three basic sacred commands in a further section, this Guide is not meant to teach you how to use the interface or actually tweet. Twitter’s documentation exists for that purpose.
In this beginner’s manual –so to speak-, I’ll assume that you have already registered on Twitter, and are at least familiar to the concepts of following, followers, and Home timeline.
A giant chatbloarg
I’ll explain here what I think Twitter actually is.
I’ve been using Twitter for more than a year now, but I only started tweeting seriously some two months ago, when my labmates started kicking into the Home timeline. Seriously means tweeting more than just once a day; in my case it’s an average of ten-fifteen times a day.
I qualify Twitter as a giant chatbloarg – it’s a random term I made up for a tool that is located between a chat, a blog, and a message board system. Which accurately defines Twitter in my sense. Here is why:
- I use it as a non-synchronized chat with my friends
- I use it as a microblog –Twitter’s original purpose- for my uninteresting personal opinions and sometimes tweet impulsively when I’m pissed
- I use it in replacement of a message board with my labmates, discussing on topics ranging from IT to totally random
The term looks kind of messy, and Twitter is indeed some blurry mix of these three tools. “bloarg” would suggest some kind of vomiting, which is what people usually do on Twitter: they vomit lines and lines about their lives or their passion. Way more than they do on Facebook, which is the point I want to get to. It’s also kind of close to the feeling you get from nasty yet funny aliens in Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hiker Guide to the Galaxy, which as you can see I’ve named this post after.
I don’t think the term microblogging service fits in anymore. After all, software and tools are what people make use of them.
Using Twitter can be very interesting for many reasons people don’t see at first, here’s my five point summary:
- It’s simple and empathizing: you need only use one tool, not three
- It’s good for your ego (difficult to deny)
- It’s an easy way to keep and monitor an audience
- It’s a powerful tool for analyzing trends and markets
- It can be very profitable
I won’t enter much more detail, but you can use it in tons of ways, for example in replacement for an RSS feeds aggregator.
Starting with a micro-community
This is the community way of starting to tweet, as opposed to the business way I’ll describe later.
As I recounted above, I only started tweeting seriously when my labmates started tweeting for real as well. I am in no way telling you this is the absolute method to get the motivation to tweet. I am only remembering how I really started tweeting.
I think 5 or 6 of those community people are enough to start feeling involved, but they need to share the two following common points:
- They must be part of the same community, i.e coworkers, labmates, classmates, Internet community mates, friends that mutually share bonds or at least know each other
- They must tweet seriously, that means more than twice a day for a good starting point; people that just copypaste their Facebook statuses once every three days are not going to motivate you to tweet, let alone watch your Home timeline regularly
You can also make this community aware of itself -which will motivate them more- by creating a list following every member involved. Lists are a really nice Twitter feature.
In short, it’s that kind of shared blog ability that I liked. I then expanded my timeline to a second micro-community, made mostly of Internet buddies I know from the websites and communities I built long ago.
You can see many sites and blogs pop like mushrooms, where the main author usually has his own Twitter account, and many of his readers following him on it. It’s usually very easy for bloggers or “famous community people” to get and stay motivated about Twitter. They have their own micro-community from the start.
Differences with Facebook
A question heard so many times. I won’t try to answer in terms of concept or social media babbling. Nobody would understand the point nor care. What I can tell from my short experience is:
You can’t annoy people as much with Facebook statuses than you’d do with tweets. If you do so, FB friends are just going to have you deleted from their news feed. I personally don’t like when people share 50 videos a day as if they were on Friendfeed (or say, Twitter), as if you had time to watch all of them.
Of course, if you’re too annoying on Twitter, people will just stop following you. But they’re generally more tolerant than if you were to do that on Facebook.
Then, maybe it’s only me and my FB friends, but people there aren’t very keen on writing about work or geeky subjects; Twitter comes in very handy to share and discuss about your preferred topics, or serious stuff. Moreover, you can get to know and follow very interesting people you didn’t even know existed, by learning about them in retweets from your friends.
That’s about the only differences it makes for me, yet they are big. FB also has its own advantages compared to Twitter.
Starting it “the business way”
This one is difficult to sum up. I wrote longer than intended, but it could be nice if you get a general understanding of what actually surrounds you in Twitter.
When I say business, I do not necessarily mean money. Let me state an example. Let’s assume you start a website, and you want it to become popular. Even if you don’t care about generating revenue, you still want it to be popular.
You’ll set up a Twitter account, and look for followers so that:
- They see, and possibly RT your tweets or feeds, sending people to the site
- You can –if you need revenue- monetize this amount of followers using tools such as Twittad, by setting up an advertiser’s image as your profile background, tweeting automatically some ads between your real tweets, …
This is why half of the time, your new followers are just random bots or people that caught you on some keyword, and added you just so that you notice them. If your Twitter page is public, that is. They either expect:
- To be followed in return (for monetizing or popularity)
- Just to be noticed, which is enough to raise brand awareness
- Neither one of the two, so long as you do not block them
The point in case 3 is that some will start following you because you tweeted some keyword that relates to them in some way. Once they follow you, they’re likely to use data from all your tweeting history and future tweets. Say, for example, harvest every keyword they can with natural language processors, in order to sharpen their general audience’s profile. It’s up to you if you’re against that or not. If you are, just be aware and block them. Or make your Twitter profile private.
As stated before, some are automated robots, and some are people like you who want their business, blog, website or whatever to become popular, even profitable.
Some followers are nastier: they act as spammers, and you’ll notice them very quickly. The only thing they tweet are generally ads, or even porn links. You can block and report them with the Report spam command when you check their profile. Luckily they won’t do any direct harm, unless you decide to follow them (which will result in having their spam shown in your Home timeline).
There is much to be written about what can be done with Twitter the business way. This is only a quick summary.
Sacred commands
I’ll define here some commands and tools I’ve been using, so that you can understand what I’m talking about. As for the commands, everyone uses them, so you’d better remember them early.
Please note that I’ll explain each command in the way I personally understand them. I tend to search for a broader meaning to each one of them.
@: relate/tag people
@mast_jp Dude, you eat too much ramen.
Probably the most important, it relates your tweet to some other Twitter account. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re addressing someone or directing the tweet to an account, as if you were waiting for an answer, though most people use it that way. Just that this account/person is in some way related to your tweet.
#: emphasize as keyword
Watched an episode of #Battlestar today, it rocked as usual.
Most people use it as if it were some kind of I-have-to-use-this-to-make-my-word-a-true-keyword thing. The same way an @ works, but only for terms or trends. This is true in a way that it will generate a link to a corresponding trend.
But trend followers and the trend list on Twitter itself don’t really care if you use # or not. Once trends are identified, you’re not forced to add an #, unless you want to generate a link. So I mainly use # to emphasize words. It exists to me only because you can’t use italic and bold.
RT: quote
RT @Chiboard Moe~moe~Kyun ! http://bit.ly/75eiw5 Kyurururin °3°
Recently re-featured as an integrated retweet (which I’m not a big fan of), the RT command is used to tell people that you’re quoting someone. Not necessarily sharing something, as most people think, and as Twitter engineers seem to believe it’s used for. You can indeed use it to share a tweet that you liked, but other people use it in a way of answering to people.
As for you, you eat too much DQP. RT @Rollabunna @mast_jp Dude, you eat too much ramen.
Many Japanese friends, for example, do so because they can take advantage of the character limitation. You can write much more in Kanji than in Latin alphabet, so you can use RT a lot for answering to specific tweets. Very useful.
Nice tools
On Mobile/iPhone
While many people use Twinkle or Echofon, I believe the real killer on mobiles is the Twitpic mail service. If you’re using an iPhone and suddenly have to share a pic, just take it, and mail it right away. It’s actually easier and faster than doing it with a traditional mobile Twitter app, which is usually slow to launch. Of course, it won’t allow you to monitor your timeline. In that case, I mainly use Twinkle, mostly because I’m used to it.
On Windows
Unfortunately, I’ve tried many Twitter desktop clients on Windows, and they’ve all disappointed me. So I’ll skip this part. While on Windows, I keep doing it in the browser. One dedicated window using Chrome makes it look like very light and comes in handy most of the time.
On Mac
My favorite tool is Twitterpod, which really fits in the background because of:
- Its Command+F7 general shortcut which pops a textbox letting you tweet right away (very nice for impulsive tweets)
- Its connectivity with the Growl interface, which notifies you of new tweets in a cool and fashionable Mac way, without being obtrusive
My labmates use Yorufukurou –literally “Night Howl”-, a Japanese client I didn’t test yet. From what I’ve seen most people in the lab use it, which means it must be worth of interest.
