Starting out on twitter? Let us look after you…

 

 

Twitter can be a very lonely place when you first start out. I like to compare it to my first day at school. A very unfamiliar experience! I felt a bit lonely, a little unsure of what to say or who to be friends with. I also didn’t want to look stupid and ask questions I thought I should know.

If you are feeling like this then it’s completely normal, we all had to start at the beginning, and we are all human – phew!

This post is aimed at the freshies.  I trust I can clear a few things up for you straight away, saving you time and enabling you to dive straight into this powerful business tool!

 

Firstly let’s look at twitter talk:

1.      Tweet:  a tweet is a short message of 140 characters or less. In your tweet you can involve links to pictures (twitpic), music (blip.fm), your blog/site, other peoples, articles, pretty much anything you want to share. This builds up the whole connection process and enables people to really get a great understanding of who you are and what your business does. Once you start to build up quality relationships leading to trust, then you are well on your way to utilizing this space in its most powerful form! 

2.      You can also read tweets of the people you follow.

 

2. Follow: You can choose to follow people who take your interest. You can follow anyone. These are going to be your twitter buddies. You can learn from these people, connect with them and their follow base, plus they may want to follow you back (if they believe you will provide great content /will be beneficial to them in some way). Remember on twitter, people usually think “what’s in it for me” (well, that’s actually in life). I follow people who provide quality content, entertain me, engage in conversation with me, help me, who I can outsource work to, who I see as being potential clients, who make me laugh!

 

3. Un follow: You do this if you do not want to see these people’s tweets anymore. If people are not providing the quality of information I’m looking for, do not engage or just promote their product most of the time, I tend to hit the unfollow button.

4. @ : This symbol appears in front of the name of the person you want to alert, eg. @sammutimer (that’s me). If you want to talk about a person or get their attention then use the @ then their name. This comes up in their twitter stream (see explanation below). I would use this if I wanted the person to see my tweet about them, gaining their attention. It can also be used in an RT “re-tweet” (see explanation below). In a nutshell it highlights to the person you are tweeting about them!

 

5. RT :  This means “retweet”. It means that the person who read your tweet thinks it would be great to share this with their follow base. I RT great content and also RT links from followers who I have a close relationship with (supporting them). I RT great messages about me at times (because I can)   I also RT clients tweets!

 

6. Twitter stream : This is a flow of tweets from all the people you are following.

 

7. DM :  This means direct message and is used to personally send a message to the follower without the rest of the twitter world seeing it (it usually goes straight to your email account also, if you have set this up on twitter).  You cannot DM someone if they are not following you. This can be annoying at times yet there are subtle ways of getting around this if you really do want to connect with them. You can use the @ signal to notify them.  My usual line to grab attention here is eg.  “  @name, I went to DM you yet you were not following me, tissues please..sniff sniff!” or something like that! I have then been followed back 90% of the time by these awesome people and gained some great exposure from them. I use this strategy with people who I believe have a big influence over the traditional media and social media crowd – it’s a winner.

 

8. # -means hashtag  : You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. The hash mark (#) before a word in a tweet allows you to tag that tweet. Why would you use a hashtag? Use a hash tag if you want to track a conversation. An example of a popular hash tag is  #followfriday. Every Friday people nominate quality tweeters – eg. #followfriday @beebow @steitiyeh @mr_billiam  @a_web_designer@alblack @trevoryoung @robhartnett    @ rebeccamezziono @kirsty_wilson etc . You can then check out the hashtag and see if you want to follow these people, adding them to your follow base. Many #followfriday people I have followed from the request of others have been fantastic people, so it’s totally worth spending the time to do. These people above are great people to link up to for first follows! Gold!

 

So, I trust this post has made you feel a little bit more comfortable in your first few weeks on twitter – stick at it. You need patience, authenticity and most of all, you need to be yourself to get the most out of this powerful space (well that’s my opinion, and it’s working a treat)!  ;-)

 

One last thing.

Once you have signed up for twitter, install either 1) www.tweetdeck.com or 2) www.twitzap.com  . These platforms make it easier to manage twitter in real time. 

Has this post helped you to get started on twitter? Do you feel ready to get stuck into this heart pumping tool? I would love to know in the comments section below - click comments. 

 

 

Tagged as: beginner, getting, how, on, Sam Mutimer, say, started, to use, Twitter, what