The Basics of Twitter

Now that I’ve convinced you to join Twitter, I wanted to talk about the basics of how to use it- terminology, features, etc. Are you ready? Ok.

First of all, each time you add something to Twitter, it’s called an update or more commonly, a “tweet.” You tweet what you’re doing. Cute, I know. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s take a look at the more social aspects of tweeting.

• Friend or Follow? You’re friends on Twitter are generally referred to as people that are either following you (getting your updates) or people you follow (you get their updates). Your followers will get your updates in their Friend Feed. Updates of people you follow will show up in yours. If you choose to make your updates private, only people that follow you (after being verified by you) will see your updates. Otherwise, they will also show up in the public timeline (or public feed), and they will be searchable.
• @replies (recently renamed @mentions)- You can reply to someone’s tweet by starting a tweet with @username (at username). So, if you were to reply to me, it would be, “@jcasabona Great post about Twitter!” A mention is simply a tweet with at @reply somewhere else in the tweet. So, “Hanging out with @jcasabona” would be a mention. These specifically target a single user. That means even people that don’t follow you will see your @replies to them and vise versa.
• DM– DM is short for “direct message” and it’s a way of privately messaging someone. Where @replies will show up in your updates, DMs do not.
• RT– RT is short for retweet and it is when someone else reposts one of your tweets. So if I had a tweet that said, “Yankees Win!,” someone else could retweet it by writing, “RT @jcasabona Yankees Win!” It’s a way of giving credit where credit is due when you find something cool on Twitter.
• #– This is a hash tag, and it  just might be my favorite part of Twitter. You would put the hash tag in front of terms you want to be easy to search for at search.twitter.com. For example, I could tweet, “Going to the game #yankees.” This would add my update to everyone else’s who  has added the hash tag for #yankees. By using hash tags, it’s easier to find trends and aggregate updates. Plus, most 3rd party Twitter apps automatically make hash tags links to Twitter’s search page. They are using for people tweeting about specific events or news items, or fun little games on Twitter. For example, every Friday is #followfriday and you add people you think others should follow.

So there you have it- the basics of using Twitter. If you have any questions, or feel I left something out, comments are open!