Twitter. Can someone explain to me how this works?

Factual Questions
21

I use Twitter to interact with like-minded people on politics, to gain valuable information from obscure news sources people share, and to promote my business interests both in political messaging (my side business) and copy editing (my primary business). People do this no matter whether their interest is in tech, music, certain television shows, or a particular profession or hobby, etc.

I have learned a tremendous amount from some very smart people. I have made actual friends whom I’ve since met in real life. I’ve been hired for freelance work, and I’ve found a person in my field who became my partner to cover my full-time copy editing gig when I need time off.

I follow just over 2,000 people and about 1,900 follow me, but believe it or not those numbers are small potatoes in the politics-related Twitterverse. I follow many people with followerships in the tens of thousands.

To really make it a worthwhile venue to participate in, you have to start following people. To figure out whom to follow, search a term you’re interested in and start reading the tweets that appear in the results. When you come across one you find interesting, click that person’s profile and read through their tweets. If you like what they have to say in general, follow them. And this is key … send a tweet to them to the effect of, “Like your tweets and am following you now. Follow back? #Gratitude.” They will have gotten a notice that you’ve started following them, but reaching out personally and asking them to follow you back is the best way to get them to actually do it — not everyone automatically follows back everyone who follows them.

Another way to then find more people to follow is to look at all the people whom the people you follow, follow. IOW, if you follow me because you like my tweets, go look at the list of people I follow, because you’re likely to find people on that list you’d also find interesting to follow.

The best way to get people to follow you is to do two things: Tweet and Retweet interesting stuff, and actually interact with people whose tweets you find interesting. The big celebrity people probably won’t respond to you, so tweet them directly only if you feel like wasting your time or if you want to make a point about something they’ve tweeted that you want the people who follow you to see. That celebrity isn’t going to give a flip, but your followers may.

However, if you reply to a tweet (be they a celebrity or average Jane), the only people who will see that tweet in their scrolling feed are the people who follow both you and the recipient of the tweet. But most of the time you want your followers to see all your tweets, even those addressed to people they aren’t following themselves, so in order for that to happen you have to turn your “reply” into what Twitter calls a “mention,” because any time you “mention” someone within the body of a tweet, all your followers will get that tweet in their feed whether they follow the person mentioned in the tweet or not. And early on, Tweeps figured out that to turn a reply into a mention so everyone who follows you can see it with the fewest characters as possible, is to just put a dot in front of the @ sign. So …
@SFP That was funny! Love that band!
… is seen by you and by anyone following both you and me. But …
.@SFP That was funny! Love that band!
… is seen by you, anyone who follows both you and me, and anyone who follows me but not you.

People who use hashtags (#) do so for a variety of reasons.
[ul]
[li]To have that tweet appear in a search that people with a specific interest consider themselves part of a group about. For instance, if you are a political conservative and want all other political conservatives no matter whom they follow, to be able to find a particular tweet you think is of importance to that community of Tweeps, put #tcot anywhere in your tweet. TCOT is an acronym for “Top Conservatives On Twitter,” and often people who identify as such will run a search on #tcot to see what people they might not follow have been saying about conservative politics. On the other side of the coin is #tlot, which refers to Top Liberals On Twitter. [/li][li]To get something to “trend” on Twitter, meaning to have it become a popular topic that hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of people are talking about. The things that trend the most end up in a list on the left side of the screen, so someone logging in who hasn’t caught up to what’s happening in the Twitterverse can see what most people on Twitter are talking about that day. As of this posting, #tcot is trending right now, as is #TheBestThingsAboutObamasDrones, which is obviously a parody meme, so you’re bound to find some funny tweets about it.[/li][li]To get more text into a tweet because with spaces between the words they’d go over the 140-character limit. [/li][li]To highlight a word since Twitter doesn’t allow bold or italics, and hashtagged words are in color and underlined (because they turn into links).[/li][/ul]
If you’re into liberal politics and you want to follow me, send me a DM here and I’ll give you my twitter handle.

Hope this was helpful.

22

Looking at RL friend’s “Following” has expanded mine. I currently follow about 300 things/people. Amazes me peopel can follow that much, and more.

23

Yay, Shayna! With your instructions I am emboldened to embiggen my twitter presence! Wish me luck, yall.

24

How often do all these people tweet things? Following 300 people seems like you’d be deluged with messages, never mind following 2000. Do people just post something once a week or so?

25

Some people post once a month and some people post like 20x/day. I read fast so I can keep up with a lot, but I don’t consider it important to read every single tweet posted by every single person I’m following.

By the way, my Twitter name is @mswhatsit (surprise) if anyone wants to follow me. I don’t tweet all that frequently but I try to make them count.

26

MsWhatsit-I just started “following” you, and I sent you a couple “tweets” (needed more than 140 characters)

27

Yay Nzinga, Seated! I’m very glad I could help. Let me know if you have any other questions and I’ll be happy to answer to the best of my ability.

As for reading all tweets — that’ll never happen. Tweets show up in a stack very similar to how your Facebook home page stacks the most recent FB posts. As time goes by, older posts fall off the screen at the bottom, replaced by newer ones at the top, so unless you spend ages scrolling back, you’re bound to miss a lot of posts. Same thing with Twitter. You will miss most tweets unless you’re on it 24/7.

You can go straight to a person’s profile and see all their recent tweets if it’s someone whose tweets you’re really interested in, but you won’t do that as often as you might expect.

Also, don’t forget to check the @connect tab periodically. That’s where tweets appear that have been addressed to you in replies or in mentions, and where Twitter will let you know that one of your tweets has been retweeted and that new people are following you.

28

I use Twitter and Google+ and do not use Facebook. The main advantage of Twitter is that it doesn’t require a smart phone - you can “tweet” from the most minimal phone possible. I use it to post the music video clips I create. The YouTube upload app has a feature that allows your uploads to be automatically posted to Twitter and Facebook, although I prefer to do it manually so I can add hash tags so the original artists could possibly see it.

A friend of mine who Tweets constantly says that 120 people is about the limit that anyone could possibly follow, and he tends to prune his list when it gets to that point.

I’ll use Twitter because, unlike Facebook, it allows you to use handles, and doesn’t force a business to link to a personal account with a personal account.

29

You can also create lists (either public or privately viewable by only you) to organize your tweets. I use my Twitter account primarily as a means to network in my field (publishing), so I have the following lists (all private, listed in approximate order of interest to me, most to least):

colleagues (people I know)
resources (blogs, job sites, etc)
publishers (for general info)
tech (Wired, etc.)
personal

So I can scan only the categories I have time for, am interested in, or whatever. In Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, you can put your lists in their own columns, as well as have columns for direct messages, mentions, and your main feed.

One trick I recently started using: If I’m browsing Twitter on my phone and I find a tweet with a link I’d like to investigate later (say, a link I want to check out on the big screen, bookmark, etc.), I DM it to myself. Then it shows up in that column and I don’t have to scroll through the Big List to find it again.

30

Scarlett-Frankly my dear, I also created lists! :wink: Mine differentiate the categories of celebs I follow:

Women
MSNBC
ESPN
Disability
RL Friends
Comedy
Boston Sports
Boston Writers
Storystuff
Music

31

Heh. My lists are:

Funny Tweeps (must follow @JennyJohnsonHi5)
House Dems & Orgs
Dem US Senators
Dem Msging/framing Tweeps
Media Tweeps
Tweet Watch/Check regularly

I was added to a list last week called, “those folks.” I’m in … interesting (?) company.

32

I use twitter predominantly for photography. My tweets are usually call outs for my photography website, when a new review is posted, etc. Sometimes I retweet cool photography articles I come across. I follow a lot of photographers and photography sites as another news source/thing of interest to look at. I also follow some friends and a few other people (some tech writers, some sports teams, etc). Allows for some quick interesting reading on topics I enjoy. I also use it to gauge national/global response to current events. Those can be very entertaining and insightful at times. Just do a search or check trending topics and see who is tweeting about the topic you want to see reaction on.

33

Two accounts that are good follows:

@RealTimeWWII - tweeting WWII as it happens. The account is in 1941 now

@Lettersofnote - Shaun who runs this unearths some truly remarkable stuff

34

I started a Twitter account and follow mostly news organizations, local politicians, humor sites, and so on. I never tweet anything of my own since I’m still trying to figure out how it all works. Still, I somehow ended up with a follower, some guy I’ve never heard of. My husband and I are placing bets on how long it takes for my retweets of Dawkins’ comments and Onion headlines to drive him away :D.

Seriously, though—why follow a random individual? Do some people decide to follow everybody they encounter on Twitter? Did he just think, “Ooh, someone interested in atheism, rural development, petty snark and space travel! That’s my kind of gal!?”

35

Is there a way to get a filtered version of someone’s feed? My main complaint with Twitter is that the signal to noise ratio is so low. Frankly, it makes me think that even smart people are idiots when I see such mundane stuff pass through their feeds.

For instance, suppose I only want to see tweets that were retweeted by at least 2 people that I’m following (and suppose it’s likely that I follow a crowd which is likely to retweet interesting bits among themselves). Are there any services that do this kind of thing?

36

Twitter’s cracking down on third-party clients, so… until they add the features themselves you’re kind of sunk.

You can put people into lists (so you can make a list for people you don’t need to check often, or a list for people who are too spammy to keep them off your main feed) but that’s about it.

I have a few features I’d love to have–

Configurable per-user, per-hour tweet count so the really spammy people I can follow without them spamming up everybody else. (What it would do is after the first 5 tweets during an hour, it’d stop showing me his and instead tweet a big roll-up of all the tweets at the end of the hour.)

Temporary blocks so people who tweet spoilers to TV shows and movies can be blocked for a few hours until they’re done-- I love The Walking Dead, but I don’t watch it when it airs, and if you’re not careful Twitter is a gigantic spoiler.

The odds Twitter will implement these in the official client? Near-zero. Sadly.

37

I dont know these words. Seriously.

38

A twitter username is the username that someone uses on Twitter. Twitter is a social media site, accessible via Twitter.com. A mention is a reference made, on Twitter, to someone’s Twitter username. The “timeline” is the stream of posts you see from people you are subscribed to on Twitter when you are looking at the main page of the site. (Actually, “timeline” is a Facebook term, but that’s what steviep24 meant.)

This really isn’t as difficult as people make it out to be.

39

I considered using it, but like the OP, don’t quite get it. My question is more what would I tweet? I don’t understand why any one would be interested. Plus I think the funny spelling would be hard for me to take, and I’d struggle to express my thoughts and feelings in 140 characters.

So what do you tweet? I’m imagining a lot of, ‘Totally agree!’, or, ‘Hell no!’. Not exactly worth tuning in for. I don’t really follow sports, and I’m not really into the celebrity thing. Which leaves me wondering who I’d follow. I am a little baffled by yet another public platform.

Tell me, what exactly do you tweet? And what do the tweets you follow say exactly? Can you give some examples? I think I have a loose grip on how it works, but not why people participate.

( thanks for starting this thread!)

40

I use Twitter as a kind of an RSS feed/source of amusing one-liners and a little bit of networking. I follow political bloggers, local reporter/news organizations, comedians, comedy sites, musicians/bands, some celebrities, and people involved in the 3D printing and CAE/CAD industries (my areas), oh…and even friends… It really is a handy consolidation of all this information. As far as posting, I post everything from articles about finite element modeling to wise-ass remarks about some news item I read. I do a good bit of interaction too (commenting, answering questions, asking questions, etc.). I particularly appreciate the professional connections I’ve made, despite the number of completely idiotic posts I submit.