Twitter is sort of like text messaging, but shorter: only 140 characters. Twitter users are identified by their @ handles: @misangela, @taqueriavecino, @carolynscupcake. If you don’t put the @, then that person will not know that you are tweeting to or about them.
Hashtags (#) are officially used to make a topic trend, but we Twitter folk tend to use them for all sorts of silliness. You’ll see stuff like #AIDSday, #oscarredcarpet or #fb, which is the hashtag that you can use to crosspost a tweet to FB. The thing that makes this #fb tag work is an app called Selective Tweets that you can install on FB.
Another part of twitter is retweeting. You’ll see RT in front of a post that has been retweeted (reposted) from someone you follow. This is how twitter users pass along info and get trends started. By using retweets and hashtags, you’ll see topics trend like mad. If you’ll look over your @ mentions, you’ll see that there are twitter users who follow you and retweet your posts occasionally. RTs are seen by all the followers of the person RTing, so you see how things can become exponential.
The basic rule for twitter advertising is this: repeat your deal 3x a day: morning, noon and night. This is to cover as many followers as possible. Twitter is a stream. TONS of tweets are missed due to the immediacy of it. That’s why tweeting 3x is useful. BUT I wouldn’t do that every day. There is such a thing as twitter spam and repeating yourself a lot every day will run off your followers.
Speaking of immediacy, it’s bad form to reply to an old tweet. Because of the flow of Twitter, it’s difficult to reply to someone commenting on a tweet from 3 days ago without context. If you do comment on something old (over a few hours), it’s best to preface your tweet with RE:[content of tweet you’re referencing]. That way the person your are tweeting to has an idea of what you’re talking about!
If only 10 of your followers RT your tweet, you can assume that you’ll reach 1000 people. Pretty cool, eh?
Twitter is a dynamic social conversation. You can interact with celebrities just as easily as friends. It truly is democratic in that way. I tweet a LOT on my personal feed. In fact, 95% of anything you see on my FB page is crossposted from Twitter.
I think Twitter is the best social media available. Get out there and TWEET SOMETHING! Here are the feeds we run:
@indigodragonIDS because a squatter got indigodragon. >:(
@misangela my personal feed
@thinkweasel Nick’s personal and comics feed