My Twitter Basics Overview.

This article will give you everything you need to know about Twitter for Business or Personal Use. The Twitter phenomenon isn’t going anywhere and can be a tremendous networking platform if you use it wisely. There are 3 basic areas to cover. Communication, Connection and Control. Lets start with Communication…

Twitter Communication

There are 5 main ways to Communicate on twitter… let’s explore each one:

1. the ‘Tweet’ – a tweet is like a mini blog post or instant text message that you instantly broadcast to the twitter-sphere. It must be 140 characters or less and will only be seen by the people who “Follow” you.  Twitter was created to answer the question “What are you doing NOW?”
2. the @ reply – this type of communication is identical to the one above except that it will also be seen by the person who you added to the end of the @ symbol. for example if you added @rogersilen to your tweet then all your followers would see the message including me even if i wasn’t following you.
3. DM or Direct Message – is exactly as it sounds, a direct message only seen by the sender and recipient. To send a direct message you must be following the recipient and they must be following you. you simply use this format ‘d username’ then your message (ie. d rogersilen I am stalking you hahahah!!) this message would only be seen by me.
4. the RT or retweet – A great way to expand the reach of a tweet. If you write a really interesting tweet and one of your followers really likes it they can retweet it by simply adding the letters RT before the message and resending it out! This is gaining major prominence and twitter is actually going to give more weightto RT’s  in their API. This is because a retweet has been validated by someone else, a third party. It allows you original tweet to be seen by all your followers PLUS all the followers of the person who re-tweeted your original message.
5. # or Hashtags – Another way to greatly expand the reach of your tweets. By adding a hashtag (which is simply #) to keywords in your tweet you are declaring that your tweet is about a certain topic. Other peeps on twitter often follow topics which are identified by these hashtags. Anyone following a certain topic that you include the hashtag for will also see your tweets. A very powerful practice that you will want to take advantage of as people following hashtags are also often much more targeted then your own followers.

Twitter Connect

All you need to know about connecting with people on twitter. There are two terms to cover first and then i will explain ways to find relevant people to connect with.

• Follow – when you follow someone it just means that you will see all of the activity of your new connection including tweets, retweets, @ replies and hashtags however you will never see Direct messages unless they are addressed to you.
• Followers – so here the reverse is true. your followers will see all your activity except for your direct messages. The more followers you have the more potential people available to see your tweets. (Of course to market effectively on Twitter.. there is more to it then that)

In todays Twitter world people very rarely pay attention to the main twitter feed of all the people they are following because it is just too much information. As soon as you are following a relatively small amount of people you can’t possibly stay up to date on all that is going on. Most people check the @ replies sent to them, there direct messages and the Hastags that they are interested in. You must keep this in mind when thinking of Twitter from a Marketing Perspective.

Search on Twitter

There are two main ways that people can search on twitter for followers, People to follow and specific information.

1. Bio Search – you can perform a bio search right on your twitter home page. There is a link on the top right of your twitter home page that says “People Search” when you click on the link you will be taken to a simple search page… when you type in a keyword it will search the twitter database for all those people that have that particular keyword In Their Bio. FYI: Your Bio is shown in the upper right hand corner of your main twitter page also.
2. The second type of search is called a True Keyword Search. This search will search all the tweets that are being published in real time to find the ones with your specified keyword. You can do this right from your twitter home page about half way down the page on the right on simply go to Search.Twitter.com

**It’s important to tailor your own Twitter Bio to be reflective of what you are Marketing or what you are all about so the right people can find you.**

Manage Twitter | Controlling Twitter

There are several things you can do to manage your Twitter experience and many very helpful applications/tools to make your Twitter experience easier and manageable. Here I will introduce the main categories of Twitter Management Tools.

1. Twitter Clients – Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck are desktop or web-based tools to manage all your twitter activities. Here is a short list of what they are capable of and why they are so necessary in today’s fast paced world.
   • Manage Multiple Accounts
   • Customize views and columns
   • Follow Topics in real time
   • Save searches and so much more
2. Auto Follower – Tools like Buzzom , Twollo or TweetSpinner allow the user to type in parameters like keywords and follow people automatically. You can specify how many people to follow per day for a given keyword and let the program add people for you.
3. Auto Tweeting Tools – with these tools like TweetLater and TweetSpinner you can schedule tweets and the tool will automatically send out your tweets on your behalf according to how you scheduled them.

So there you have it.. A great place to start finding your way around Twitter. Twitter is a glodmine opportunity if you learn how to market their effectively. If you want some real insider secrets you can sign up for my newsletter because I will be sharing some really cool stuff over the coming weeks and months.

Best Twitter Resources and MUST Have Tools:

TweetSpinner – Great for Scheduling your Tweets and Spinning them to make them Original. Powerful!!

TweetLater – Now called Social OOMPH

Seesmic – Recommend Desktop Client it’s AWESOME!!

Buzzom – Auto follow people, you don’t have time to sit and search and find people believe me it doesn’t Pay!