OK, I know you have to set up an account. Then what? I believe you select some people you want to follow? Then what? Do you get every tweet they send? On your phone? PC? Does it get annoying? Is it worth the effort?
Also, who is worth following?
Thanks,
mmm
You can set notifications for when you receive a Tweet, when someone likes a Tweet you made, etc but you can also turn it all off and only see it when you actively open Twitter. Which is what I do.
Yes, you’ll want to pick some people to follow. Who is up to you – if you have favorite writers, musicians, politicians, companies, etc. You’ll also see “re-tweets” where you’re following Writer Smith and he sees something funny and sends it out as a tweet himself and you read it. Then maybe you say “Hey, that guy Writer Smith follows seems sharp; I’ll follow him too”. You’ll get every tweet Writer Smith sends out (that isn’t a private message to someone else of course) but they just show up in your stream when you open Twitter and you’re not obligated to read them all. Tweets actually addressed to you are flagged under your notifications so you don’t miss them while scanning the last twelve hours of activity.
I mainly use it as a means of following political news, having favorite journalists, politicians and writers as my follows. My wife follows some favorite celebrities and people in the TV industry as well as some comedians. Of course, you could also just follow real life friends and family as well.
I choose not to be a Twit and don’t care to follow any Twits.
+1
Eh, it’s just one more line of communication and one of the best for being up to date on things (esp. if you’re into news and current events). Sure, some people use it for seemingly banal stuff or act like morons but, if I cut out every channel where that happened I’d have to give up TV, radio, the internet, newspapers, etc and sit under a blanket with my fingers in my ears.
I’ve found other channels work well enough. For example, if there’s a product in development, and I’m interested in knowing when it’ll come out, the producer is usually able to set up email notifications, as well as tweets. They have FaceBook and probably YouTube activity also. They want to use every possible channel…
But it doesn’t mean I have to. I get sufficient information in other ways.
Nothing wrong with Twitter. It’s something akin to having a luggage rack on the roof of my car: it might make my life a little better…but at the moment, I don’t do that.
Sure. No reason to go into a thread about it to proclaim that you don’t do it though.
I use it exclusively for baseball. I follow other fans of my team, all the players who have accounts, the official team account and a few media people who talk about the team.
I only fire up Twitter when there’s a game on or in the off-season when there’s team news. It’s really fun to tweet as part of a group like this because everyone else is watching the game too so I can just be like “what an awesome hit!” out of the blue and everyone knows what I’m talking about.
I don’t have any alerts set up - I only check twitter when I’m in the mood for Twitter. If someone has liked or commented one of my posts I see it next time I’m there.
Jophiel gives a good explanation of how one can use it and I think that’s pretty much how most people use it. It’s definitely how my brother uses it and he’s an avid user.
Unless you’re just following your family or something, I think alerts will be annoying.
You can tailor your experience as you go. Follow a bunch of people then drop people who upset or annoy you. Very easy.
I totally left out the whole “hashtag” thing, mainly because these days people have battered it in something barely recognizable. No one is ever going to search for all posts tagged #FuntimesinCAwithmyhubby. However, for actual events it can be very useful to search by hashtags and actually get useful information on anything from a world event (#Syriabombing) to a local concert and if it’s getting rained out (#Bandname)
IMHO, I answered the first two questions asked by the OP, IMHO.
I do it with all the zest and enthusiasm of someone doing an annoying homework assignment, which it kind of is. I’m supposed to be doing self-promotional things.
I know next to nothing but I was given a long list of #hashtags used by authors and by LGBTQIA community. I try to use a bunch of them.
There are ways around the char limit. You can put what you want to say on a web page and then post one of those cleverly truncated links and the link doesn’t use many characters, whereas Twitter ever so kindly fetches a good many words from the linked article and displays those on folks’ twitterfeed; the displayed words don’t count towards your char limit, only the URL itself plus your hashtag characters.
I can’t tell you much about followers or following, except that you can see who “liked” what you twote and who retwate it or commented on it, that’s sort of built in.
OH, yes I forgot, I actually DO know something useful to pass along! TweetDeck! It’s a much much nicer UI than the native Twitter page. It’s more like a console.
Yeah, use Tweetdeck.
I follow around 1000 people/accounts. It’s a mix of (mostly UK-based, but in the Trump era there’s now quite a bit more US-based people) journalists, columnists, historians, scientists, authors, musicians, comedians, legal commentators (for some reason), random people who are genuinely funny and/or insightful. The key thing for me is that I much prefer people who are not always entirely serious - twitter should be fun - and people who just post their latest article or whatever get binned quickly.
It takes a fair bit of curation to tailor your twitter feed to your taste, but I always have a Tweetdeck tab open, and I’m glad I’ve put the effort in over the years. It’s by far my favourite social medium, but I fear that the requirement to make it what you will is probably limiting on their ongoing viability.
I advise turning off tweet notifications. The emails get very annoying.
I follow several people. I typically sign in every few days to see what’s been posted.
I rarely tweet. Perhaps a dozen in seven years. They were directed at people I follow.
I have never tweeted a status or update on my life. I’m not interested in telling the world I had a great dinner and here’s a photo. 
That has never interested me.
Twitter is fantastic for breaking news. For example I was on it after the Boston Marathon attack. Searching with a hashtag and getting information from people posting from the scene.
I was on searching hashtags last week after the health care bill vote.
So, if I follow someone, but do not check it for a week, when I do check it do I see everything he has tweeted for the past 7 days? Or is in more hit-or-miss, like Facebook is?
And if I am following, say 200 people…once I do check in it’s going to be worse than my work email backlog upon returning from vacation??
mmm
All the tweets will be in your timeline. The most recent will be first.
It doesn’t take much time to scroll through them. That’s the advantage to the short message format. Links can slow you down, but you don’t have to click on them.
I wouldn’t follow too many people. Imho more than 50 would be a headache.
I’ve got roughly 20.
Don’t be afraid to unfollow people that tweet stuff you aren’t interested in.
I routinely add and delete who I follow.
I follow people who have a quirky sense of humor. Or tweet neat pictures. And a few writers and authors. The only notifications I have on any more are about new followers.
It’s hit and miss. You probably won’t see every tweet sent by people you follow unless the people that you follow aren’t very active. With 200 average users, you likely wouldn’t see everything they post even if you checked twitter every day.
I think of Facebook as being people choosing to fill your feed with their own crap, and Twitter as you choosing to fill your own feed with the crap you’re into.
Twitter for me is a way to see what’s in the Zeitgeist, keep up with my favourite TV and movies and comedians, and I’ve also made some nice friends on there too, though I’m no closer to them than I am to you guys. For my own contributions, I tend to post those stray odd little thoughts that flit through my mind every day that amuse me. I also will review the entertainment I am watching, which is usually not at the same time anybody else is, so it’s a bit of a solitary affair sometimes.
I don’t follow many people, I am quite judicious about culling the chaff, and subsequently I don’t have many followers, as I will clear out bots and spammers when I recognise them.
My family aren’t on there, though. They are only on Facebook which I do not subscribe to.
Patton Oswalt’s Twitter feed is one of the most consistently funny that I’ve ever seen. But at the moment, he’s in serious lurrrrrrve with his new fiancée, so you’re going to have to swim through a fair bit of them being disgustingly, insanely happy to get to the biting wit. Those occasions when some foolish non-comedian decides that getting into a Twitter fight with him is a good idea are particularly satisfying. He shows no mercy.