Twitter is all the rage in social networking these days, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to use effectively.
In fact, unless you’re addicted to faceless Internet chatter, you may have already written Twitter off. Its 140-character limit on individual messages, after all, seems designed more for those with short attention spans and lots of time on their hands than it does for, say, a busy professional.
But there’s more to Twitter than meets the eye.
Plenty of serious businesspeople, news junkies and well connected professionals of all stripes are turning to Twitter on a regular basis to promote their businesses, expand contacts or simply to keep abreast of subjects that interest them.
But to get the most out of Twitter, you need to scratch a bit beneath the surface. Here’s how to start.
DITCH THE INTERFACE
Soon after you create your Twitter account, spend some time looking around to understand what it’s about. You’ll quickly learn that Twitter is a kind of a micro blogging tool. A “tweet,” for instance — the word used to describe an entry — is a maximum of 140 characters long, forcing you to be succinct in describing what you’re doing. The social networking aspect of Twitter kicks in when you “follow” other people who are discussing topics of interest to you. They in turn might “follow” you, either to reciprocate or because they’re interested in what you have to say. The number of followers you have will ultimately become a source both of pride and influence.
But once you become familiar with Twitter, supercharge it by using a third party interface. Among the most popular — and powerful — are TweetDeck, Seismic Desktop and Orsiso. All three are small downloads, easy to install, and they are all vast improvements of the Twitter interface. That’s partly because they allow you to keep track of multiple conversations, mentions of you and direct messages, and they offer many other niceties as well.
One feature that’s particularly important for any Twitter application is a “shorten URL” box. Because Twitter restricts tweets to 140 characters, it becomes vital to provide a shortened form of Web addresses, or URLs. Many Twitter users rely heavily on the TinyURL site to provide the shortened URLs. Good third party Twitter applications do this work for you, however, allowing you to paste the full URL into a “shorten URL” box after you type your tweet. With one click, you can send both the tweet and shortened URL — a huge time saver.
SEARCH TWITTER
Even if you don’t plan on using Twitter as a micro blog, it’s probably important for you to know what people are saying on Twitter about you, your company or a subject in which you feel you have a stake. That search may be what pulls you into Twitter as a contributor — and what keeps you there.
Twitter Search is your official gateway into every subject discussed on Twitter, but the third-party Twitter interfaces all offer a search feature as well. Type a term — whether it’s your company’s name, your name or a subject that interests you, and you’ll quickly see who’s discussing it — and you’ll be able to “follow” those who are and respond, if desired, to their tweets.
LEARN ETIQUETTE
As with any community, there are rules of etiquette — either spoken or unspoken — at Twitter, and you should know them if you want to cultivate or preserve your reputation. Chief among them is that you should not overtly use Twitter as a means to spam others — to brazenly promote a Web site, cause or product.
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