Twitter Starter
Welcome to the world of the tweet freek quick guide to Twittering
You most likely have an account already and are just trying to get a grip on the ins and outs of Twittering.
Twitter is text-messaging on steroids. Twitter uses the SMS protocol to deliver short messages to your phone; your IM account; your Twitter home or a stand-alone Twitter application. You decide where you want to read your “tweets,” the name for each short message.
There are a few things you can do before you dive into the twittersphere. Start by personalizing your profile and uploading a picture or avatar for your profile. You can also personalize your background by choosing one of the designs Twitter offers from the “Settings” area of your profile, or by uploading your own custom background. If you don’t like the custom twitter backgrounds provided try a site like twitterbackgrounds.com.
You can also take a few minutes and put in a brief bio on yourself. It doesn’t have to be long, just a few lines will do. If you have a website, a blog or a product you promote put a link into your profile as well.
Great, you are ready to follow people. You can start with the “Find People” link at the top of your page; you can invite people you already know or search by name or location. Another great way to find people that you want to get connected with is by using the search box in the margin of your home page. This allows you to type in a keyword and find people that are talking about it. Then you can dive into the black hole that is twitter, click on a few pictures, look at their followers and the people that they are following.
Add a few, add a few more, some of them will follow you back.
I can see you now thinking I am going to follow 1000 people a day until I have 1 million followers then I will be able to sell my acne cream. Well, like all good things, someone has to come along and mess with your mind.
Twitter imposes limits to help prevent system and user abuse. If you hit a Twitter limit, they will tell you by showing an error message in your browser when you try to perform an action. If you’ve hit a limit, it means you’ve exceeded one of these limits:
They do not limit the number of people who can follow you, but they have put limits in place to stop people from aggressively following others. Everyone is allowed to follow 2000 people. After that, follow limits are based on the number of people who are following you. Follow limits cannot be lifted by Twitter, and everyone is subject to follow limits, even high profile and API accounts.
If you’ve reached a follow limit, you can help yourself by reducing your following number until it resembles your followers number. Since the follow limit is based on followers/following ratio rather than time, you’ll have to un-follow people before you’re able to follow again. Follow limits cannot be lifted by Support staff.
I personally like a variety of different people that I follow, the more the merrier for me. You may just want to follow a few, maybe only friends and family. There are no hard and fast rules, do what you want.
Some people are joining twitter for business purposes, their strategy is different. They want have as many people to follow them as they can in the shortest time possible. To do this you have to use some sort of program or have a system. A word of caution though, get targeted followers, not just followers.
For example, if you have a diet product you want to promote, maybe look for MLM people and see who is following them. I personally use the Twitter Genie System for targeted followers. This system has worked well for me with 17,000 targeted followers in the first three weeks at a very low cost and it just keeps plugging along.(update: over 55,000 across my test sites, 7 weeks :>)) There are a lot of programs out there that promise this and guarantee that, just google them before you plunge in.
The fun part is to start Tweeting. You can “tweet” about anything and everything you wish, as long as it is 140 characters or less. Talk about your family, your hobbies, your business, what you’re reading, something you’ve learned, or whatever you’re doing at the moment. Provide links where they’re relevant. The point is to get involved in a conversation and provide interest and value to your followers. There are lots of tools out there for viewing and sending tweets to enhance your twitter experience. I use the free tool Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is pretty good overall and lets you shortent urls when you post tweets which is a great idea.
Twitter Shorthand
Sending private messages directly from Twitter’s web interface can be a pain if you have to scroll through a long list of mutual followers. A tip for sending Direct Messages faster, is to press the first letter of the person’s ID while you are in the DM dropdown. This allows you to page through names quickly and easily.
Some Twitter shorthand
| follow user | Follow a user's tweets – you will receive all her updates. |
|---|---|
| leave user | Stop updates from the user (but leave her in your friend list). |
| delete user | Drop the user from your friend list. |
| invite email/number | Send a twitter invite to a friend's mail or phone. |
| whois user | Ask Twitter to return a quick info about the given user. |
| off | Turn off all messages to you. Sending it twice will even silence direct messages. |
| on | Will turn the messages on again. |
| d user message | Send the message as a private message to the given user. This message will not appear in any public time line and is usually delivered via email, too. |
| track term | Subscribe to tweets containing term regardless who posted it. You don't need to follow anyone to get those notices. |
| untrack term | Stop the tracking of a term and get no longer messages about it. |
| untrack all | Delete your whole list of tracked terms. |
| track | Ask twitter to return a list of all currently tracked terms. |
| stats | Ask for some basic statistics like number of followers and your track list. |
Hope that helps somewhat. There are some really great tools and enhancements for Twitter out there, figure out what works best for you.
Do you know how to limit the number of tweets displayed *per person you’re following* on your home page?
As it is, one very tweety person can fill up the page.
I couldn’t find anything in the Twitter help notes.
Not sure there is a way of doing that, if I find a high volume poster and its not interesting I usually unfollow them.