Twitter For Beginners

TWITTER!  I’m sure you’ve all heard of it, if not amongst friends or family you will almost certainly have seen it mentioned in the media at some point, as more and more news channels and newspapers reference it in their news stories (and not just about who Piers Morgan has got in an argument with, again). With ‘Twitter For Beginners’  I am here to show you the ropes of Twitter and how you can optimize it to your tastes.

Firstly, the basics: What is Twitter all about?

Twitter is described as being a ‘microblog’, this is because you are only allowed 140 characters per post (or ‘Tweet’, we’ll come to this soon..) and this post can consist of anything you like, whether it be news, a random thought or witty joke the choice is yours. Upon setup, every account is set to public, meaning anyone in the world can see what you have posted but this can be changed if you wish. Users ‘Follow’ one another so they can see each other’s tweets on their feed, you also have the option to ‘unfollow’ or ‘block’ anyone you don’t want seeing your tweets.

Twitter is full of words and phrase which you may have encountered and they are important to understand when using the platform. Here’s a list of some useful ones:

Tweet: A 140 character message.

Retweet (RT): Means you can share another person’s tweet onto your feed.

Feed: The stream of tweets you see on your homepage, full of tweets from people you have followed.

Mention (@): Is used when sending a tweet to another user by ‘mentioning’ their username. ‘@DeadlyDigital’ for example, would be sending a tweet to us. Users are then notified when they have gotten a mention.

Favourite: This is an option to ‘favourite’ a tweet you like and comes in handy as it acts as a bookmark too if you want to come back to the tweet later on. You simply go to your ‘Favourites’ section of your profile to find them.

Hashtag (#): A way to denote a topic of conversation or participate in a larger linked discussion (e.g. #Easter, #ManUnited). A hashtag is a discovery tool that allows others to find your tweets, based on topics. You can also click on a hashtag to see all the tweets that mention it in real time, even from people you don’t follow.

Direct Message (DM): A private, 140-character message between two people. You may only DM a user who follows you.

Handle: Simply your Twitter username.

If you ever get bogged down in all of Twitters jargon, they have a great online glossary for you to refer back to.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/166337-the-twitter-glossary

Setting Up Your Profile

Once your account has been setup (simply sign up with your email & a password on the homepage) you can now go about creating your profile. Firstly you will have to pick a handle of your choice and a profile picture, they can be whatever you want but it is always good to have a picture of yourself, you will tend to get more engagement from other users. Next up is your Bio. This is simply a short description of who you are and/or what you like to tweet about, other users can see this and may follow you purely based on your bio (shared interests etc..). It is also optional to have a header picture and a background picture if you want to give your profile your own personal touch. A header picture sits just behind your profile picture and is also where your bio will sit. A background picture will cover the whole background of your profile but this is only visible on the website and not through the twitter mobile apps, it’s totally up to you though.

Here’s an example of my profile page and a shameless plug while we’re at it.

Following & Followers

At first, Twitter will recommend you a lot of random twitter accounts of celebrities and other people. Although a lot of them might not interest you at first, the more people you follow who are relevant to you the better the recommendations Twitter will suggest. You might want to take a bit of time searching through profiles you like and following them. A good idea would be to follow any friends on twitter and looking through who they are following, it might give you a sense of who’s out there worth following.

I have heard several reasons from friends as to why they don’t use twitter and more often than not they say it’s because they don’t want to be reading about things that just don’t interest them or “I don’t want to know what *insert celebrity* has to say”. The beauty of twitter is that you can optimize it to suit your interests perfectly. Depending on who you follow you can have your feed filled up with tweets about a particular genre of music/film, a sports team or whatever suits you, it just might take a bit of discovering for yourself, if you stick with it long enough it can become a very enjoyable experience with loads of useful things to read and the potential for good conversation with other like-minded people from around the globe.

You’re Ready To Get Tweeting

Once you’ve got everything setup and looking flash it’s time to start tweeting. It can seem like you have nothing of any quality to say at first but the more you use it the more you’ll have to say and the more you’ll enjoy it. That’s it from me for now, happy tweeting twits