Top 10 Twitter tips and tricks

November 11, 2013 by  
Filed under Twitter Basic Tips

Below is a listing of our top 10 favorite Twitter tips and tricks. These tips will help make your Twitter experience more enjoyable and can help increase your followers.

Customize

  • Change your profile picture. Use a picture of yourself to make it seem more personalized if this is your personal Twitter account.
  • Utilize as much of the 160-character limit Twitter BIO space allows. Include keywords your followers or potential followers may be searching for.
  • Make your own background image. But, do not make the image too much like an ad or sales pitch. The background image must be less than 800k and we recommend a size of 1600×1200 for a large image or smaller if you plot on tiling the image or just having it on the left-hand side. Finally, keep in mind that smaller resolutions and monitor sizes will hide much of the background.

Third-party tools

Take advantage of the hundreds of different third-party online tools and services that enhance your Twitter experience. Below are a few of our favorites.

  • TwitPic – Take advantage of TwitPic to post pictures on your tweets. If you want to post pictures while away from the computer, use the Twitterific app.
  • Qwitter – Fantastic service that sends an e-mail any time someone unsubscribes from your Twitter profile and mentions a possible Twitter post you made that may have caused them to leave.
  • Manageflitter – Fantastic site for managing your followers and getting an simple to read overview of people not following you back, silent users, and inactive users.
  • WeFollow – Fantastic website that allows you to add yourself to a listing of Twitter users by tags you find fascinating.
  • SocialOomph – Another fantastic service with a collection of free Twitter tools including the ability to schedule when a tweets gets posted.
  • Tweetbeat – An brilliant site that takes the trending topics on Twitter and gives you a clearer explanation of present and past trending topics.
  • TwitterMeme – Another fantastic location to find the hottest links on Twitter.
  • Twitter Grader – Fantastic service that grades any Twitter account and gives you additional details and ranking information.
  • Twitter Fan Wiki Apps – Finally, this wiki has a listing of several hundred different Twitter applications and tools for users wanting more.

Use Twitter search

Take full advantage of the Twitter search tool. Below are just a few tips that can help improve your search capabilities on Twitter.

  • Search for your website or blog URL and see if others are mentioning your page.
  • Search for anything near you by adding near:”city state”. For example, typing near:”Salt lake city Utah” club would return current tweets that have happened in Salt Lake City, Utah with the keyword club in them.
  • Find people who you may delight in following by searching for keywords that interested you.
  • If you do not want tweets with links add ? -filter:links at the end of your search query.
  • Need more options, use the Advanced Twitter search.
  • Any time you get brilliant results click the “Save this search” button to save that search. These searches can then be found under “Saved Searches” on the right-hand part of your profile on the ancient Twitter interface or under the “Searches” tab next to your timeline on the new Twitter interface.

Followers

  • Engage followers.
  • Do not follow too many people. No one is going to follow someone who is following thousands of people but only has 10 followers.
  • Retweet fascinating posts.
  • Retweet and participate in conversations with people with a lot of followers.
  • Realize it is impossible for anyone to read every tweet.
  • When first joining do not follow hundreds of people, doing this may mark you as a bot.

Make useful and fascinating tweets

  • Try making all your tweets informative, useful, or amusing.
  • Do not post mundane posts, e.g. eating a bowl of cereal.
  • Add hastags to your tweets. For example, if your tweet is about computers, consider adding #computer in the tweet.
  • Tweet frequently. No one is going to follow someone they do not know who has not tweeted in months. Try at the very least to tweet a few times a week or daily if you can manage.
  • Do not whine or complain. Everyone will unfollow anyone who constantly whines or complains.
  • Try making your valuable tweets during the times people will most likely see them.
  • Keep some space available in your tweet in case someone retweets your post.
  • Use special characters in your tweets.

Know the lingo

Know the Twitter lingo, these are just a few examples: @answer, Direct Message (DM), Follower, Hashtag, Retweet (RT), Trending Topics, and Tweet. See the Twitter description for a full listing of Twitter terms and Lingo and related terms.

Follow the masters

Following a few of the masters of Twitter and Social Networking will give you an understanding of how to tweet better, posts to RT, and inspiration for tweets of your own. Below are the top ten Twitters we recommend following.

@GuyKawasaki
@Scobleizer
@jeffbullas
@briansolis
@tonyrobbins
@kevinrose
@timoreilly
@donttrythis
@zappos
@brainpicker

  • Twitaholic – A full listing of the top users on Twitter based on Followers. This is a terrific service to find and follow the top users and possibly incorporate some of the thoughts they are doing on their account.

Tip: Many of the first few hundred people are celebrities on Twitaholic, if they do not interest you skip the first page.

Make and use lists

Twitter list iconTwitter lists are an brilliant method of filtering filter through the people you follow. To make a list, click the Lists link and then Make a list. After making a list visit the persons profile page you wish to add and click the list icon, as shown in the picture to the right. Our Computers and Tech list is an example of a public list we made.

Go Mobile

Apple iPhones, Blackberry phones, Android phones, Windows phone 7 phones, and most of the other smart phones have Twitter applications. Take full advantage of these applications. For users who do not have smart phones Twitter also has extensive support for SMS, which can send tweets over a text message.

Advertise

  • Mention your Twitter page as many places as you can, e.g. your business card, e-mail signatures, web page, blog, Facebook, etc.
  • Make a tweet button or at least your Twitter name on your pages, similar to the below examples.
  • Make a Twitter profile widget on your blog or website.

 

Follow us @Computerhope

By:  www.computerhope.com

Tech Tips: Getting Started with Twitter

November 11, 2013 by  
Filed under Twitter Basic Tips

With Twitter in the news because of a public stock offering, you might be deciding it’s finally time to start tweeting.

But what exactly is Twitter, a tweet and the etiquette for using the well loved communication tool?

Here are the basics. Keep in mind that the company’s service isn’t expected to change in the small term after it starts trading publicly Thursday. Twitter Inc. is pricing its initial public offering of stock at $26, valuing the company at more than $18 billion. It’s the most-anticipated IPO since Facebook went public last year.

To start your presence on Twitter, you first need an account, which is free. Go to Twitter.com or its mobile app to make one. Pick a username, or handle, which is how people will refer to you. Try to find something unique that tells the world a small bit about you. I like to travel, so I picked (at)GlobeTrotScott as my handle.

Once the account is set up, just click in the box that says “Compose new Tweet…” and type whatever is on your mind, up to 140 characters. On the mobile app, look for the small box with the feather to compose your tweet.

But Twitter isn’t just about broadcasting what you had for lunch – though you can do that. It’s about learning what other people are up to. You can start following other people by using the “find friends” feature. You can also search for various celebrities, news sites or whatever else might catch your interest.

You don’t have to know somebody to follow that person. Just click the small follow button. It’s very voyeuristic.

This is probably a excellent point to talk about privacy. There really isn’t any on Twitter. Unless you lock your account, anyone can follow you and see what you have tweeted. And those you follow know that you are following them. (As for locking your account, you can do that by checking “Protect my Tweets” in the settings, but that defeats the point of Twitter, which is to give you an audience for your musings, whether brilliant or inane.)

There are a few ways to engage in a conversation on Twitter.

The first is to just mention somebody in a tweet. Just precede the Twitter handle with the “at” symbol. For instance: “It was nice to catch up with (at)GlobeTrotScott today.” If you want to be fancy, throw in a reference to the bar you were at: “It was nice to catch up with (at)GlobeTrotScott today over drinks and snacks (at)TheSpottedPig.”

If you mention me in a tweet, I will see it on the (at)Connect tab of Twitter.com or the (at) tab on the mobile app.

You can then answer to the tweet. The person who tweeted and anyone else mentioned in it will see the message in their feeds. But remember: Although it is just aimed at them, anyone on Twitter can see that message.

You can also retweet a message, often referred to as RT. This is a way to share something somebody else posted on Twitter with all of your followers. If you hit the “Retweet” button, it will just repeat the message to your followers. You can also write “RT,” copy the person’s handle and the message. Feel free to add your own thoughts before the RT to show why you thought it was worth sharing.

Finally, there is a way to send a private tweet – known as a direct message, or DM – to somebody following you. The simplest way to do it is to go to that person’s profile summary. On the pull down menu next to “following,” there is an option to send a direct message. You can also just start a tweet with “d” and then a person’s handle, and it will send a direct message. You want to make sure you do this right: Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress after sending a sexually suggestive message that he thought was private. It wasn’t.

As you start following more and more people, it might be hard to keep up with all their tweets. Enter TweetDeck and HootSuite. Their websites and apps let you customize your Twitter feeds to sort through all the noise. You can make a stream of tweets from your friends, another from news sources, another for sports and another from celebrities. Separate work from fun.

A few other key points. When adding a link to a tweet, first shorten it through a site such as bit.ly. That way your tweet won’t go over the 140 characters, and it will look cleaner, too. You can also add a photo to your tweet by clicking on the small camera icon. A link to the image will then be added to your message. But remember, that link takes up precious characters, so keep the message small.

Finally, let’s talk about hashtags. They are meant to bring together several tweets on the same topic. So at the end of baseball season, you might see many tweets including (hash)WorldSeries or on Thanksgiving you might see (hash)TurkeyDay (hash)Thankful (hash)Sleepy. Yes, people do tend to string hashtags together.

Just don’t do too many. It’s looked down upon and then your tweet will (hash)Fail.

By AP / Scott Mayerowitz; Nov. 07, 2013


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