Tweeting for the Masses

Editor's Notes

• #2: So you’ve registered a Twitter account and you’ve started Tweeting and now you find yourself trying to answer the million-dollar question: How do I get people to follow me. Well you’ve come to the right place. This is Tweeting for the Masses. And I’m going to tell you how to grow and audience 140 characters at a time.
• #3: You’ve probably gotten your friends to follow you, but unless you have some measure of fame or internet notoriety, odds are this is where you’re Twitter following ends… So, the first rule of tweeting: you need to follow others before others follow you.Now you want to follow users with similar interest, because these are going to be the people or organizations that are most likely to reciprocate your follow by following you.So if you click on the find people tab, you can either search people by name OR – what I recommend – click on Browse Suggestions and then try to find users on the categories you like… You’ll find Music, News, Sports, Science everything.And this is important: most people fall into the trap of following the most famous, well-known people. That’s great – their tweets will come up in your feed. But if a person has 1 million followers, they’re probably not going to follow you in return… Instead choose people that have a modest following… They’re much more likely to return the favor.
• #4: Let’s talk about the AT tag. When you attach an @ sign to any person’s Twitter username, you direct your tweet at the person. Now this is still a public Tweet – which means all of your followers will see it and it will show up in your Tweet feed – but it also ensures that your tweet will show up in the users @ box. What’s cool about the @ tag is that you don’t have to be following somebody to Tweet them, and likewise, others on Twitter don’t need to be following you to Tweet you.A couple extra points: 1) use the direct message function in the right side menu if you’d like to privately Tweet another user. And 2) when you’re surfing another person’s profile, or the feed of the people you follow, you can click on the “reply” function in the right corner of each tweet to automatically direct your next tweet to that person.
• #5: Now I told you about the @ box… If you’re on the home page, you’ll see a sidebar over to your right with an @ sign attached to your user name. If you click on that, you can see all the Tweets specifically mentioning you.Since these people have either taken the time to Tweet you, it’s a good idea to respond back… It’s good Twitter etiquette and valuable tool in social networking. And again, you can Tweet back by using the reply function.
• #6: What is a hashtag. Well first of all, it’s not something you smoke. You can turn any word into a hashtag simple by attching the # sign to the front. In general, hashtags are used to aggregate popular terms or event or people that are trending on Twitter.So for instance, say you add a number sign to Red Sox – which is a pretty popular tag – somewhere in your tweet. If you type in that same hashtag into the search function on your twitter homepage, every tweet mentioning Red Sox will pop up, including yours... And that’s what you see on the right side of your slide.Hashtagging is really good way for people to see your tweet an also see what you’re interested in.
• #7: You can always find the most popular hashtags in the Trending Topics sidebar on your home page… These are the terms that are currently being used the most on Twitter, and also the terms that people are searching for.And mixed in with these hashtags, you’ll find regular terms that have not been tagged at all, but are still very popular on Twitter. For example, sometimes you’ll see Justin Bieber spelled as two words, and sometimes you’ll see justinbieber the hashtag. Obviously, they’re both talking about the same person, but you want to use the more popular form if you feel the urge to tweet about Justin Bieber. Again, you’ll give more people the opportunity to see your tweet.And finally, creating your own, unique hashtags is a cool way for you and your followers to start your own little trend. For instance, somebody that I was following created a hashtag called NBA Player Lotions… And he got his followers to change the names of basketball players to make them into a lotion. So think of these tags as an inside joke that has the potential to spread.
• #8: On to retweeting: this is the basic mechanism for sharing somebody else’s tweet with all of your followers. What’s neat about retweeting is that you don’t have to follow someone to retweet them, and people don’t have to be following you to retweet you.In addition, getting your tweet retweeted by others is really the best way to reach out to potential followers. So say you write something clever, and one of your followers retweets the message to all of his followers… Now all those people will see your name, and will be more inclined to follow you.A few odds and ins: You can tell that somebody else retweeted a tweet when there’s an RT connected to the @ tag as in the above picture. When you retweet something, it will show up in your own feed with a gray box next to like you see in the bottom picture.And finally, as you see with the Paul Yeager tweet on this slide, you can simply click the retweet function next to reply if you’d like to broadcast that Tweet to all of your followers.
• #9: So now you know the essential of twitter. Let’s quickly run through a few additional resources.To set up a twitter feed on your wordpress page, go to your wordpress dashboard, then click on appearance in the left-side menu, and click on widgets.Drag the twitter widget over to the right sidebar to the place where you want it to show up. And type your username into the box… Also, you don’t want you entire Twitter feed to show up, because then there’s no reason to actually go to your twitter page… So keep the maximum number of tweets to show option to three or less.
• #10: There are bunch of link snipping resources out there, but I like Bit.ly the best.The reason you use these is because you don’t want to copy an entire url into a tweet that only holds 140 characters. This site will shorten the URL for you and allow you to copy it as many times as you want. It’s also cool because it allows you to see how many times people have clicked on your link. And it keeps a running archive of all your shortened URLs.
• #11: And finally, there’s hashtag.org. It’s a pretty sparse site, but it allows to search for any hashtag and get detailed trend analysis for it. It’s a really good way to see what’s popular at what times. And it also gives you a feed of all recent tweets with specific hashtags.If you’re looking for the latest tag tweets without the analysis, check out Search.twitter.com or simply use the twitter search function.This concludes our twitter presentation. For further information, please visit ufblogging.wordpress.com.