Some basics of Twitter — Part 1

Dur­ing 2009 I spent a fair amount of time get­ting famil­iar with Twit­ter and under­stand­ing the over­all value to both indi­vid­u­als and busi­nesses. Squarely rooted in the “Social Net­work­ing” space,  peo­ple may have heard of Twit­ter but the odds are good that few know how to use it and/or the value it pro­vides. As I am see­ing inter­est­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties with Twit­ter, I wanted to share some of those expe­ri­ences with you.

So what is Twitter?

For those not famil­iar with Twit­ter, a good anal­ogy is to com­pare it to a CB Radio. With a CB Radio you estab­lish your “han­dle”, you talk on a spe­cific chan­nel and those on the chan­nel can:

1. Lis­ten to you.
2. Ignore you.
3. Respond to you.

Apply­ing this anal­ogy to Twit­ter, you cre­ate a user­name, you send out typed mes­sages of up to 140 char­ac­ters (indi­vid­u­ally known as a “tweet”) and those that are “fol­low­ing” you (think about being sub­scribed to) get your tweets. This doesn’t mean that your tweet gets read, just that they were sent.

What is the Value of Twitter?

It takes a lit­tle time and “play­ing” to appre­ci­ate the value of Twit­ter. What I learned is that once you start to fol­low the right people/topics etc., you have a bet­ter appre­ci­a­tion of the value Twit­ter pro­vides. For exam­ple, some inter­est­ing, and cur­rent, “use cases” include:

• Edu­ca­tional (I am using it to fol­low the stock mar­ket and what pro­fes­sional investors are doing).
• Find­ing a job (more on that below).
• Get­ting Coupons (yep, there are sites for that as well — http://twtqpon.com/).

So What Are the “Key” Pieces to Twitter?

First, you have to obtain a Twit­ter account (which is free) at www.twitter.com. Once you estab­lish your account, it will be the loca­tion where the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion is saved:

• Who you are following.
• Who is fol­low­ing you.
• A his­tory of all of your tweets.

Once you estab­lish your Twit­ter account, you could start cre­at­ing your own “tweets”, but right now there is no one they are being sent to. I have to check — they may be aggre­gated and avail­able from search.twitter.com — but that’s a dif­fer­ent conversation.

Who should you follow?

The selec­tion of who you fol­low will evolve over time and will reflect the type of infor­ma­tion you want to obtain. You can fol­low the activ­i­ties of Indi­vid­u­als, Com­pa­nies and Web Sites across a wide range of topics/activities. I learned a tremen­dous amount about the value of using twit­ter by focus­ing on indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies focused on stock trad­ing and/or related eco­nomic news/topics.

While you are free to fol­low me on twit­ter, some sources you can lever­age to find “Tweet­ers” include:

• Search for keywords/topics at http://search.twitter.com/.
• Find web­sites that have the Twit­ter Icon.

1. News sites (i.e. http://twitter.com/foxnews, http://twitter.com/usatoday — then click follow).
2. Job Sites (http://www.twitterjobsearch.com/ — Once you get a list, you can choose who to follow).

How can you receive Tweets

The next log­i­cal ques­tion is “Once I fol­low some­one, how do I read their tweets?”. There are a num­ber of inter­est­ing answers — some of which truly demon­strate the power and value of Twit­ter. In a future entry, I will cover the following:

• Using the native Twit­ter envi­ron­ment (Browser based).
• Installing a 3^rd party pro­gram on your PC/Laptop.
• Get­ting tweets on your Mobile Device.

Hope you found Part I inter­est­ing — and if you have spe­cific Twit­ter ques­tions — feel free to ask!

Check out Part 2 to learn more!

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Tags: digital presence, Social Networking, social networks, twitter, twitter jobs

Category: Commentary, News