Twitter and the Little Blue Bird

Have You Seen These?
 

The little blue bird is everywhere. Perhaps you’ve seen it popping up on a friend’s Facebook newsfeed, or maybe at the end of a television advertisement, on promotional flyers for your favourite stores and restaurants, it is even popping up on some of your favourite athlete’s uniforms and gear. What is this little blue bird? It seems like its taking over the world.

It is.

The little blue bird that you are being bombarded with is the international symbol for Twitter. What is Twitter?

 

In order to understand how to use Twitter, you need to learn the lingo so lets begin with a series of definitions:

“Tweet”: A Tweet is a 140-character post. Tweeting is the fuel for Twitter. Tweet about what you are doing, where you are, shout out to your favourite restaurants or stores, provide links to websites, interesting articles, cool pictures, videos, quotes, the possibilities are endless!

“Follow”: When you sign into Twitter you are faced with a newsfeed, similar to what you are used to seeing with other social networking websites such as Facebook. You can see the posts from your other friends. In Twitter, you can see the Tweets of the people that you “follow”.  To choose a follower, type in the name of the person or organization that you wish to “follow” in the search field. Once their name pops up click the “Follow” button beside their name.

“Followers”: Followers are the Twitter users that follow you on Twitter.

“Username”: Your username is your unique Twitter ID. It allows other users to “Follow”, “Tag”, “Reply” and “Retweet”/”RT”  to you.

“@”/”Tag”: The “@” character is used to “tag” another Twitter user in your tweet. To use this feature, key in the “@” symbol immediately followed by the username of the person that you wish to tag with no spaces (i.e. @username01). Next you write out the rest of your tweet as usual. Once you finish, click on the “Tweet” button your friend will receive a notification saying they have been tagged and providing them with a link to your tweet.

“Reply”: The “Reply” feature allows you to respond to another person’s tweet by tweeting and tagging them in your response. Underneath of the tweet that you wish to respond to, click on the reply button.

A second window will appear where you can respond. This window will automatically have the username of the person that you wish to respond to with the “@” symbol. Once you finish typing in your message, click “Tweet”.

Once you have clicked “Tweet”, the user that you are replying to will receive a notification letting them know that you have replied to their tweet.

“Retweet”: If a user that you “follow” has tweeted something really interesting and you would like to share it with your “followers”, you have the option to “Retweet”, by clicking the “Retweet” button below the interesting Tweet.

This again will bring up a box, this time, with a confirmation of the message, showing you how it will appear on your Twitter page. Click “Retweet”. The original poster will be notified that you have “Retweeted” their tweet.

“Trending Topics”: A trending topic is a word or phrase (“hash tagged” or not) that has the twitterverse abuzz. The trending topics change on a regular basis and differ in various geographic locations. A trending topic can be a name, a word, a question, a funny one-liner etc.

“#”/“Hash Tags”: A hash tag is used to define the topic or theme of your tweet. By including a hash tag, you and your followers are given the option of clicking on the tag to see what other users have posted about the same topic or theme.

Note: Hash tags have no spaces. If you have input a hash tag correctly it will appear as a different coloured link.

Once it has been posted, the text will look like this:

Its for Businesses Too!

Twitter is not just for individuals, it can work great as a marketing tool for small businesses and charitable organizations as well! (See post “Small Businesses & Social Media: To Tweet or Not to Tweet?”).

For more information on how Twitter works and what you can use it for, check out this video posted on Twitter’s YouTube page.

If you would like more instruction on how to use Twitter, give us a call at the Picton Branch Computerlab and our staff would be more than happy to show you how everything works!

#HappyTweeting!