Clients

A client is an application you use twitter through. A great example for that is tweetdeck, because it has multiple columns and you can get it on Windows and MacOS, because it is written in Adobe AIR. I like to keep track of my friends timeline, my mentions and a facebook newsfeed. The fourth column changes between different lists and searches.

Link shorteners

If you’ve been tweeting and including links in your tweets, you may have noticed that links take a big chunk of the overall tweet length, which is limited to 140 characters after all. Link shorteners will be your friend. There are multiple services for that out there, I personally use bit.ly, because it’s widely spread and easy to integrate to tweetdeck or available as a plugin for Chrome/Chromium.

Analysis

There are different tools for analyzing your or others accounts. A service which is fairly new and very powerful is Klout. It calculates how you impact twitter with your tweets upon how much reaction like mentions or retweets you produce. It also analyzes your style, if you mostly tweet links, mention other users and so on. There is a ranking plugin available for Chrome to see other peoples Klout score directly on the twitter website.

Connect

I can only recommend you chain your facebook profile to your twitter account and let your friends there know what you’re posting on twitter. Just go to the twitter application.

These were the first five days of How to Twitter. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment Thanks to everybody who followed through so far!

Content is king,

don’t kill it with boredom.

It’s been a long time since my last status update, so here we go: looking for breakfast.

When you’re a blogger, you should add some personality to your blog, that’s correct. If you don’t have a blog and are worried that your twitter account has some spider webs on it, use it as motivation. Get up, do something, tweet that.

Duplicate content is a fool

Of course it is, so don’t retweet somebody a lot of your followers are following, it will just annoy them and flood their timeline.
Furthermore, don’t link the same post/site twice without telling you have tweeted it before. Include a memorable title, or users will be disappointed the second time they visit one of your links, they believed to be new.

Don’t hate

All you miserable maggots will bite to dust and I’ll impale you with a bamboo stick!

If you try to stand out as a professional, discuss, don’t harass. What you tweet about is very sensitive. Don’t tweet that you hate work, when you just got hired by a firm and you have no side-projects, don’t put a bounty on peoples head, imagine your audience sitting in front of you. To get away from you, they just have to click unfollow instead of leaving the room and giving you the possibility to question why, like in the physical world.

Don’t whine too much. It’s very irritating to see people bitching around all the time. To be on the subject and being still critical is not impossible

For further bad tweets see: Top 10 worst tweets

This is a lot depending on what you want to achieve. A podcaster I follow uses twitter to organise with the people he meets around Germany. Others promote their newest content, their firms launched products, etc. I’ll just leave out talking about puppies or that you just had breakfast, because these you should do rarely, if you’re not breeding dogs or a dedicated food blogger.  Your bio(graphy) is also important, so potential followers get a quick overview, what they’re going to read when they follow you. I’ll just use my current as an example:

PhotoDesignCode-Junkie, currently at the Nordic Multimedia Academy. Free for shootings and projects, speak to me in: EN/DE/DA. Follow me for more insights.

I consider it short, summarising my interests, revealing my current occupation, that I’m open for work, trilingual and inviting to follow me.

Try to connect with people you know in real life, people from the same area or field of interest. This will give you opportunities to jump into conversations, help or just get interesting updates. As this is a medium that leans so close against the pulse of the net as no other, being there when something happens or at least on a daily basis, you should make routine out of checking your account, mentions and retweets on a daily basis.

Why should you use a twitter account?

There are a couple of good answers. Most business people will now be looking for a combination of “will”, “increase” and “sales”, but it’s not that simple. If you do it right, it might create a better relation to your customers, empowers you for more direct communication and that also only if your target group uses twitter. Furthermore will it not help throwing out random links to your homepage or products, if it is not new, relaunched, changed, or in a conversation. Sounds easy? No, but that’s why there are multimedia designers like me
As a private user you can promote your private projects, network close and instantly with friends or just stay up to date with your favourite celebrities breakfast sandwich. BOOOORING. At least the last.
If you, like me, are becoming a multimedia designer, study something in relation marketing, no matter if it is internet related or not, you definitely should have a Twitter account. If you ever, possibly by a client, boss, co-worker or a just a possible client at a party at very unlikely circumstances could be confronted with the question: “What about social media?”.
Sounds like it’s never gonna happen? Don’t think so. I’m not a god of social media and I don’t even have a lot of followers, but my count is growing (feel free to follow if you find the first peek at my time line interesting ).

I use Twitter connected to other social communities which makes my tweets, apart from retweets and mentions visible on for example facebook. When I find something interesting or funny, that my friends could like, I tweet it, if I find it has not been seen, is brand new or just legendary. Furthermore I tweet new blog entries (more in depth about new things or things new to me) or portfolio entries with sets of photos, posters or code snippets.

Here comes the first day of my little Twitter introduction. I think everybody on my education (multimedia designers) should experience Twitter and know how to use it, because our education includes knowledge about internet branding and social media. Let’s start out from scratch. No really, this is aiming for the point of account creation. If you’re further and know the terms, just skip this part.

Twitter
Twitter is a microblogging service run by the Twitter Inc. It gives people the ability to share messages of exactly 140 characters.
Wikipedia says:

Twitter was produced in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July. Since then Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 200 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day.

tweet
A short message sent through twitter.

retweet
A retweet is a repetition of somebody else’ tweet, you chose to spread to your followers.

TL / timeline
A timeline is a chronical collection of tweets. Your timeline would consist of your tweets and retweets. Your friends timeline a collection of theirs and so on.

hashtag / tag
These are used to flag certain content that belongs to a specific topic or field. If I’d be tweeting about a new lense, I bought for my camera, I’d add #photography #lense #Tamron (just to make a point) and to make it easy to find for people, looking for tweets on a certain topic.

lists
You can create lists to sort people after location, topic or something you think connects them. Lists are followable, as persons.

For more basics, visit the twitter help center: http://support.twitter.com