Assuming that you’ve already created your Twitter account and started following and are followed by lots of other Twitter users, I’ll get right into the first step. So, maybe you’re following your friends and family on Twitter but you can also find popular Twitter users that you can follow. Go to find people and then suggested users. These are people who are selected by Twitter and are thought to be a worthwhile to follow.
Check out their profiles to seen if they interest you. Some important things to note when deciding to follow someone are what their website is and their bio. If it covers something you're interested in then it’s probably a good idea to follow them. You may get some useful information in your Twitter stream.
Another thing to look at is how many people they are following and how many people are following them. If they are following thousands and thousands of people but onle a couple of people are following them then may not be the most helpful person to follow. And last, check out their Tweets, are they something you find useful, creative, just plain funny? Don’t just follow someone because they have a lot of followers. Make sure they have a quality that you enjoy as well.
If you have your own blog or website, Twitter makes it easy for you to add your latest tweets to your site. Go to your settings and then account, click on add Twitter to your site here. Now, choose where you want to put it. If you want to put it on your MySpace page, click here. If you have a blog hosted by a blogger, click here. If you want your updates to act as your Facebook status updates, click here. And if you have a Typepad account, click here. If you don’t have any of these, it’s okay. You can still create a flash or HTML widget to put on the side of your choice.
I'll show you what it would look like to create a blogger widget. Click on continue, choose how many of your latest tweets you want to appear, select a title that will show up here or you can choose to not have a title. This is a preview of what your widget will look. You can see that people will be able to instantly follow you on Twitter from your widget. Then either follow the instructions to insert it on your blog or grab the code and embed it where you want it to appear. With just a few clicks, all of your blog visitors will see your tweets which is a great way to get more followers.
If you signed up for Twitter using a name that you don’t want to use anymore then there's a pretty easy way to change that without disturbing your fully loaded Twitter account. Since Twitter is becoming much more main stream, you may want to use a name that easier to find and say your nickname you had when you are kid. Go to your settings and then account.
Here, you'll see the user name you signed up with. This is included in your custom Twitter URL so my URL is Twitter.com/molzy. I can give this out to anyone who wants to find my Twitter profile. But to make it easier, I want to use my real name so see mollymcdonald is available and it is.
So now, all I need to do is enter in my Twitter password again for security purposes. Then click on save. And that’s it. Your Twitter direct messages and replies won't be affected but you will need to make sure you send out a Twit to all of your followers so that in the future if they're trying to send you a message, they know what name to not use.
If you use a feed reader to keep up with your favorite blogs then you may want to consider subscribing to certain people’s Twitter’s dream so you'll never miss one of their Twits. This could be useful if you follow a lot of people but you want to make sure that you don’t miss the Twits of a couple of important people like your husband or wife or boss.
It’s really simple. Go to the profile of the person who you want to keep up with. Underneath their list of people they’re following, you'll see RSS feed, click on it. You'll then be able to select the feed reader that you use from this drop down menu as well as a preview of what you’ll be subscribing too, then go and subscribe. And now, when I go to my Google Reader, I'll see all of the Twits from this person and I'm not even logged in to Twitter.
In this episode, I want to touch on Twitter etiquette. Just because it says here what you’re doing, it doesn’t mean you should be sharing everything that you're currently doing. Do people need to know that you just ate a sandwich? Probably not. Do they care that you’ve finished a load of laundry? Doubtful. But you can turn these very unuseful Twits into useful once. If you really feel the need to share them, how about instead of I just ate a sandwich, you wrote going to the sandwich shop on Valencia, anyone care to join me?
Your original twit went from useless information to something that may connect you with some friends. Okay, how about the laundry? Instead of just finished a load of laundry, you could say, “Tips for laundry, darn this sop gets grease stains out instantly.”
The question you should ask yourself before you twit is how useful is this information that I'm sharing with hundreds of people. Another great way to use Twitter is to ask questions. I recently had car trouble so I send out a twit. You can do this for any topic you can think of. Within minutes people have replied to me with lots of helpful tips about my car. And don’t forget you can do the same to help your fellow Twitters out as well.
If you're looking for specific person on Twitter then you can easily do a search here or you can look for people in your address book but did you know that Twitter has a search page that helps you find topics and people that people are talking about on Twitter. Go to www.search.twitter.com, you see this looks kind of like a Google search page and just like Google you can enter in what you're looking for and see who is talking about. I'll try iPhone.
This shows me search results of all the Twitter conversations going on where someone uses the term iPhone. And it’s in real time so every time there's a new twit about iPhone, I can refresh the page and get new results. If there are two people having a conversation about the iPhone, you can view the original conversation as well as the original twit and you can also reply from here as well.
You can sort your result by language, send this out in a twit to share them with your followers and subscribe to the RSS feed because you'll know where there are new twits about your topic and don’t be shy. Of course you can search your own name or company to see who’s talking about you. It’s important to know so you can respond if needed.
In episode six of this series, I introduced you to Twitter search. I want to show you some of the advance features that will help you find the exact content you’re searching for in people’s twits so you can be exact or lose with this as you like. You can choose to search for all of these words or an exact phrase and even choose to exclude words.
You can also choose to search what it’s a hashtag. A hashtag is a tag that some people use at the end of their twits to help group together their updates. For example, if I was twitting about a great experience I have at Twitter I would do something like this, love all the cashiers at hashmark TraderJoes. This way when people search for TraderJoes here, all of those twits will be group together.
You can also search for topics from a specific person to a specific person or referencing a specific person. You can add a location, a date range and choose to search updates that include a positive or negative or asking a question. You can also look for updates that only include links and then choose how many results you want to shown per page and here are my results. So, you can see if you're really looking for specific content that people maybe talking about on Twitter then definitely check out search.twitter.com.
Twitter is great for updating what you are doing but it’s also fun to share pictures of what you’re doing as well. There are lots of ways you can do this. You could upload your photo to your Flicker or Photobucket account and share the link or you can use a handy service called Twitpic which will posts to your photos and send them to Twitter as well.
Go to Twitpic.com. All you need to do here is sign in with your Twitter username and password. There's nothing new you need to sign up for. Now, I've already been using Twitpic for a while so immediately when I signed in, I'll see all of the photos that I've already added.
Also included is my Twitter profile information as well as an RSS feed that people can subscribe too. In order to upload a photo, just click here. Select an image from your computer and enter in the caption. Check this box if you just want the photo to post to Twitpic and not also to Twitter. If you leave this unchecked then this will go through and post to your Twitter account with your caption as your twit and a link to your photo. Then click upload and you can view your photo.
You can also go to your settings and use your mobile phone and update your pics to Twitter on the go, just email them to the address you’re given with the pin number provided in the subject line. When you visit your photos, just click on one and you can see how many people have viewed them and the people have left comments. You can leave comments as well. You can also add tags to them so it will be easier to find when people are searching for specific topic, just another way to make Twitter more fun.
If you share a lot of links in your Twitter updates then you may want to think about trying and service that will allow you to keep track of what's happening with those links after you post them. Automatically, when you post a long link, Twitter will shorten it using the service tinyURL. While it works all right, there are other services that give you more information.
One of those services is called bit.ly. To access it, just go to bit.ly. You could choose to sign up for an account but you don’t have too and you can also sign in with your Twitter credentials and Twit to directly from bit.ly. Let me show you how to it works.
Enter in a long URL here and optionally, you can create a custom name for your URL. Click on shorten and here is my short link which I can now copy and then paste into a Twitter update. If you sign in to bit.ly then you can post to Twitter directly from here. now every time someone clicks on my link on now just go to info for the link you're tracking and I have a lot of links here and you can look at the past day, week or month we’ll see a time frame of when people are clicking to referring sites that the clicks are coming from as well as the location of the people who are doing the clicking.
You'll also see any replies to your update that contain this link across the different social networking sites. It’s a great way to know how many people are actually interested in the links that you're sharing on Twitter. If you’ve been using Twitter for a while you may notice that its come pretty may stream so much that even a lot of celebrities are using it.
Here are some examples and even some celebrities you may want to follow if you want to see what they're up to. Britney Spears, her tweets come from her team her website and from Britney herself. The Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger, if you want to see what the current governor or California is up to. Jimmy Fallon who appears to update to Twitter all by himself. Shaquille O'Neal who goes by the real shock, loves Twitter and may even call you on the phone if you send them a twit. Ashton Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore both twit, as our US President Barack Obama.
There are even popular new sites on Twitter like CNN and anchor Rick Sanchez frequently tweets and shows his updates on the show. There are all kinds of people using Twitter for all kinds of reasons. It’s up to you to have fun with it and decide exactly what you want to share with the people who follow you.
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