Twitter Tutorial

Even if you don’t grasp the hype surrounding twitter, it doesn’t hurt to be well-rounded and have a little bit of knowledge about the craze. So here is a brief description of the service, what it’s being used for, and some of the jargon you’ll encounter in the twitterverse.

Twitter is an internet-based micro-blogging site where anyone can create a free account and post messages of up to 140 characters (about two sentences) from their laptop or phone. When you create an account, you choose a “handle” or name you want posts to show up under. Anyone can read your posts, unless you place restrictions on it, but a person has to be your “follower” for your posts or “tweets” to automatically show up on their home page or Twitterfeed.

 

Individuals use it to comment on what they’re doing right at that moment, pastors use it to update twitterers on how vacation Bible school is going, and companies use it to update the community on events and new products. Zappos, the shoe company, has used it to promote new products as well as to reward Twitter followers by flying two to Vegas for lunch and a tour with the company president.

 

If you like something you read, you can retweet (RT) or post the same thing on your site, but you have to give credit where credit is due. You can also create a private reply to a tweet by doing a DM or direct message. You can also do a public reply by doing the “at” symbol and the twitterer’s handle so it might look like @lilnorthrn. Banks are using this as a way to connect with those who have questions. A bank marketing officer can do a search on Twitter to see who has questions about financial products and then respond with information or a link to help answer that question.

 

Ah, but what about those eternally long links? How do you post those when limited to 140 characters? You go to a website that creates website shorthand like TinyURL.com. This article has a web address that has 75 characters, much too long for a tweet. But of course, it’s so good, you want to post it. So, we created a Tiny URL for you: http://tinyurl.com/owab7c4. Ah, 26 characters...still 114 characters left. So, if you’re A&W Restaurants and you’re celebrating your birthday by giving away free root beer floats, you want to make sure you don’t use all your characters so others can retweet.

 

Twitter: is it a fad? It’s certainly worth experimenting with, and the potential is amazing. With Twitter, anyone can post anything. It’s how the world first learned of the US Airways crash into the Hudson River. It’s how news is coming directly from Iran regarding the election controversy there (and you can follow the conversations about this by searching in Twitter for #IranElections). But again, keep in mind, you still can’t believe everything you read…especially on Twitter where everyone and everything may not be what it seems.

 

If you want quick training tips, put #training into the search. Somewhere in the midst of great workout ideas and dog training thoughts, you’ll also find quick and immediately applicable training tips from Becky Pluth, our CEO.

 

For a video tutorial on Twitter in Plain English, go to www.commoncraft.com/twitter.

 

You can follow us on Twitter.

 

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