How To Twitter
Most people arriving on twitter for the first time seem to not quite understand what twitter is about and what they are supposed to do.
You should set up a personal account and business account if needed.
Personal Account
For your personal account use your own name and upload a picture of yourself as quickly as possible.
People on Twitter put more trust in profiles with a picture.
Enter your link as a personal blog, facebook account or website that you wish to promote.
Business Account
For your business use your keyword(s) if you can and put a link back to your website. A logo works ok for a business account especially if you have multiple websites that you are creating accounts for.
Start Tweeting
You can do this by writing in the tweet box up to 140 characters long which counts down as you type also be aware that it you want to link out to something interesting you have seen on the web then you may have to count the characters of the link as well.
Shorten and Track Links
A way to shorten the website link and also track how many people clicked on your link is to use a link shortener service. Twitter will shorten links automatically if you do not use a link shortener service.You will be able to track the effect of these links in your analytics by looking for http://t.co which is twitter’s own link shortener.
Futher reading on the twitter shortener can be found at
Twitters t.co link shortening service is a game changer
How to Find Link Shorten Services
For more info on link shorteners just google ‘link shorteners for twitter’ and you will probably find bit.ly and a few others. This service is generally free unless you want professional tracking. I use the free service and I have always found it to be sufficient.
Your First Tweet
All you have to do is type your message into the box below and press the Tweet button
You will then see your first tweet will be listed just below the tweet box with the word Latest just before it.
Ok so you have made your first tweet but you should try to make four or five interesting tweets to show people you are a real person. The more interesting that you make your tweets the more chance people will start following you.
What to be Careful of when Tweeting
Be very careful not to tweet everything in real time if it indicates that you away from home for any length of time for example. Writing something like going on a road trip all weekend may not be the best thing to tweet. Write it after you come back and then it will be more interesting also.
Look at the difference
1. Going on a roadtrip all weekend whooohoooo!
2. Took a roadtrip to lake whatever and had a great time !
Chances are with option two you will have people who have been to lake whatever striking up a conversation with you and you will have the opportunity to connect with people that you would have never connected with otherwise.
Understanding Twitter Navigation
The first thing you will see is the user name you used when you signed up. In my example on the right its davidsbain.
Just below you will see the tweets you have made since you joined twitter and if you click on this you will see all these tweets.
Below this you will see the amount of following, followers and listed. In order to get followers you can send out tweets or you can follow people. Once you have one person following you, you can click on their name and click on their followers. You can then find interesting people to follow. I will explain this later in detail.
Under the Home Link you will see @davidsbain and this is where you will find tweets that people have sent out to the general public with your name on the tweet. The way to do this is write a tweet like ‘hey @jo @jack @john how did the concert go last week ?’. This way you can tweet to multiple people at the same time and get a four way conversation going.
Below this you will see Direct Messages. This is where someone has sent a message directly to you. You will soon learn there are software programs out there that let you do this automatically. As you can see I have 772 messages and I only scan these now to see anyone looking to connect on facebook etc. Unfortunately this function is overrun with spam and I never use this automation to send out direct messages as I find it very annoying people do this to me so I am not going to do this. If you wish to do this then make sure you are sending out your facebook link of something similar.
After that you have favorites which allows you to store a tweet in your favorites just like internet explorer. If you dont have time to check out a tweet or you think the content was interesting then you can add the tweet to your favorites for future viewing.
Retweets allows you to see all the retweets people have made who you are following. This can be interesting as people dont generally retweet messages that are not or any value so potentially you will find more interesting content and also people who are interacting with other tweople.
Twitter Things to Be Aware
Deleting Tweets
You can delete tweets you have made previously but do not send out the same tweet over and over again and keep deleting the tweet. Twitter will classify this as spamming and ban your account.
Ok so maybe you are thinking why would I do that ? I have seen people tweet out the same tweet with a link for their business over and over again but this sort of practice is not something you will want to do as twitter are monitoring such activity.
It is more productive to constantly be creating new information and sending links to new content than to submit to spamming.
Twitter Limits
There are limits to how many people you can follow at one time and also a block at 2K if you do not have within 10% of followers to following. So if you have followed 2k and only have 100 followers then you will be blocked from following more people. I will explain later on the search instructions how to find and follow relevant people.
Whats Next
The next post I will make will cover the search function as this is a topic all on its own.
Link will be added here as soon as I have completed it.
If you have any questions on this post please add your comments below.