A Newbie's Guide to Twitter

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of the wondrous new social media marketing website Twitter. This site allows anyone to create an account for free and then begin “tweeting” or talking to anyone who will listen. As useful as this site is to follow the actions of others, keep up on current events or find out when your favorite band is touring, it can be an invaluable resource for business owners. This is because Twitter has a fascinating search feature that allows you to type in a keyword, say, a keyword that includes the name of your business, and you can instantly see what anyone and everyone is saying about you, your products and your service. You don’t have to be a part of Twitter to run a successful business in 2009, but the amount of real time feedback you can get is astonishing.

You don’t even need an account to follow what is being said about your business. Like most websites, Twitter has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to and you can customize it to only send you notifications when someone mentions specific keywords. It’s free, it’s easy and it can shed a lot of light on what people really think of your brand. If you do want to join Twitter, it might be helpful to register multiple account names that reflect your brand names so no one else can take them and misrepresent you in any way.

Twitter 101

Now that you understand how you can use Twitter, let’s look at the nuts and bolts of how you communicate using this new flashy tool. First off, a tweet is when someone speaks. All tweets are limited to 140 characters, and that includes spaces and punctuation. This is the charm of Twitter, you have to say what you want to say in the least amount of words possible, but this brevity has also given rise to the use of even more annoying Internet abbreviations, such as LOL, WTF and so on. It would be impossible to list them all here so if you see one coming up over and over that you don’t understand, just Google it.

A Tweep, is Twitter lingo for a Peep or a friend. You send Tweets to Tweeps. It’s okay, we’re almost done, try to keep your lunch down. You’ll also occasionally get a picture of a cute whale when Twitter goes offline for one reason or another. Since Twitter being down classifies as Fail, this character is often called The Fail Whale. You’ll get to know him/her quite well.

One more thing. You’ll see the use of two symbols, @ and # quite a bit on Twitter. If you want to reply to someone else’s Tweet, use the @ and then their name. If you want to make something searchable, use the # symbol before what you type. That’s pretty much it. Have fun with Twitter and don’t let it waste your entire day. It can be a great tool for any business if used properly.