Boom!

How to use Twitter

This is pasted from numerous emails I’ve sent to friends and family in the past year.  Bear in mind that the best way to understand what Twitter is and how to use it is to… start using it.  Feel free to chime in with additions, clarifications, and criticisms.

This is not how to use Twitter well or strategically or without annoying you and everyone around you. This is about what to do once you sign up and find yourself staring at a clean slate.

Related posts:

• My take on Twitter
• Email from my mamma
• FETHR, an open-source Twitter protocol
• Robbie 2.0

How to Use Twitter

There are three basic ways of communicating on Twitter:

1. Public messages aimed at no one
2. Public messages that reply to someone or mention one or more people
3. Private messages sent to one person.

The most basic way to use Twitter, without even signing up, is to look at people’s Twitter individual accounts via a Web browser.  That gets old, though, and belies a chief benefit: aggregation.

Once you create an account and start “following” (aka “listening to”) people, you can stop visiting their individual account pages and just visit login to your own dashboard. The tweets from everyone you follow will be collected in one place for you to sift through.  Cool, huh?

To make things even easier, you can download a Twitter application (“app”) and run it on your computer.  Twitter apps tend to provide a better user interface (“UI”) and have all sorts of features, like built-in replying, search, etc.  You can even install a Twitter app on your cell phone.  I recommend specific apps later in this post.

Now, on to communicating.

1. The default tweet is public and aimed at no one in particularly.  Think of it as a beacon you emit for all to hear/read. Or, if you’re into journalism, think of yourself as a tiny, personal publisher.
2. You can address messages to me (aka, “mention me”) by putting @superstrong somewhere in the message.  It’s just as public, but I will get notified especially that a message was aimed at me.  There are two ways to address me:
   • If you are replying to me, begin the message with the @superstrong, like, “@superstrong Is this thing on?”
   • If you just want to mention me in some way, you can put it anywhere and it will be understood that you just wanted to include me.  e.g., “Getting a Twitter refresher from @superstrong”.

My Twitter app will bring my attention to both types of “mentions”.  The difference is how other people’s Twitter apps interpret the message.  If you start your tweet by mentioning me, people who follow you but don’t follow me will not see it in their Twitter feeds.  Why?  Because from their perspective, it’s an irrelevant conversation.  (Everyone can still see it if they look at your feed on the Web.  We’re talking just about how Twitter apps filter information for people.)  If, alternatively, you mention me anywhere else in the message, everyone who follows you will see it.

So, let’s say you write a mesage like “@stranger Thanks for the help!” I would not see that in my Twitter app, because I don’t follow username “stranger”.  The distinction helps me to see only tweets relevant to my life when receiving feeds through a Twitter application, and especially if I’m having some people’s Tweets sent directly to my phone as text messges (only a handful).

3. You can send private (“direct”) messages to me, which is similar to texting my cell phone or sending me an email.  Although your Twitter app should should take care of the syntax for you, you can manually direct a message to someone by typing “d [@username] message…”.  Note that the person will not receive your direct message (“DM”) unless they follow you.  Plain-old “replies” or “mentions” (see above) are a nice way of getting someone’s attention if you want to address them and they don’t follow you.

Twitter applications

I’m on a Mac and iPhone and use Tweetie for both.  On Windows PCs, I hear good things about TweetDeck, also available for the iPhone.  For Blackberry, I used Twitterberry.

Twitter Text (SMS)

So far I have only talked about using Twitter via a Web browser or an application.  There’s a third way you can interact with it: SMS, aka text message.  In fact, Twitter started as a way for people to communicate with each other via their phones, which is why the service limits each tweet to the same 140-character limit as a regular text message.

By default, Twitter will not send tweets to your phone.  You can enable basic interaction with your phone by going to “Devices” in your Twitter settings and registering your phone.  From there you can also decide what hours are OK for Twitter to send you text messages.

At that point, you can send tweets from your phone, but you won’t receive any.

To receive tweets on your phone, enable “Device updates” for each account one at a time.  Currently, the only way I know to do this do this by viewing each person’s account via the Web browser and enabling it.