You’ve been hearing a lot about Twitter. Your child is using it. Your co-worker is using it. People on the news talk about different celebrities and politicians “tweeting,” and you’re wondering what all the fuss is about. What, exactly, is it, and how can you get on board? Should you even want to?
I’m writing this for all of the brilliant, witty and curious people in my life that I honestly believe Twitter would benefit. I’ve been on Twitter for almost two years, and I’ve learned a lot about how it works — and how I think it works best. And given that I would love to be tweeting even more with the people in my life that I care about, I thought I would share what I’ve learned. In this post, I am going to cover the absolute basics of Twitter — what a tweet is, how following and being followed works, user names and mentions, short URLs, and the wacky fun of hashtags and retweeting.
What is a tweet?
A tweet is a post or update from a user on Twitter. Twitter limits these posts to 140 characters (that is, letters, numbers and symbols) and spaces. What can you say in a 140 characters, you might ask? A lot. One of the great virtues of Twitter is its brevity. When I was growing up, my mother always asked me for the “Reader’s Digest” version of my rambling stories. She wanted me to whittle it down to the parts that mattered — and I became a better storyteller (and conversationalist) because of that. The 140-character limit on a tweet creates an economy of language. You don’t have space to waste space. It also generates another of Twitter’s great virtues — speed. With 140 characters, you can converse and contribute very, very quickly. So while I know that it may not seem like much, I encourage you to embrace the 140 characters of a tweet as the rules of the game. The constraints are part of what make it fun.
What’s with all the “@”s?
Mentions on Old Twitter
When you join Twitter, you create a user name. Mine is @circlesoffire. The @ in front of the phrase “circlesoffire” indicates that the words are a user name. Your user name matters on Twitter. It appears next to every tweet you make. When people want to get your attention on Twitter, they will “mention” your user name with an @ in their tweets to do it. And when people want to repeat something you’ve posted, they will include your user name before the copy of your tweet. You’ll notice on Twitter that there is a whole section devoted to your “mentions” — a listing of every instance that anyone has posted your username with an @. This is where the conversation on Twitter often begins for people. Another Twitter user asks you a question, or comments on something you’ve tweeted, and you can reply to their post by typing their username with an “@” first, and then your reply.
Mentions on New Twitter
Somebody I don’t know just followed me! What’s that about?
Don’t worry — it’s perfectly normal. On Twitter, there are three groups of people that you need to care about: 1) the people you follow, 2) the people who follow you, and 3) everyone else.
The people you follow are the other Twitter users you choose whose tweets will appear in your Twitter home feed. Once you follow them, every time those users post a new tweet, that tweet will appear in your feed (or you will see a notification that new tweets are available). You opt in to seeing other user’s tweets in your home feed — no one can require you to read their tweets.
The people who follow you are the ones who have opted in to read your tweets with the rest of the tweets of everyone else they follow. If you don’t want someone in particular to read your tweets, you can always “block” them from being able to follow you. However, if your tweets are public, then they will still be able to see your tweets directly by going to your twitter.com/yourusername page. If a Twitter user is harassing you or behaving in a malicious way, you can complain about them to Twitter, though. I mention these things because I know that it’s something people worry about. Most of the time, however, you don’t have to worry about who’s following you at all.
And everyone else… There is a wide, wide world of people using Twitter. Some of them are in your network of followers and who you follow, some more are in the networks of those who follow you and you follow, and a great many more are completely outside of those networks. You can connect with them, and they can connect with you, by searching through public tweets* and the magic of hashtags and trending topics — those hyperlinked phrases beginning with the symbol #.
Yeah, what are all those “#”s about?
When you see a “#” with words connected to it in someone’s tweet, this is called a hashtag. Hashtags are one of the great linguistic innovations of Twitter. In essence, they provide a way for sets of tweets from numerous users to be tagged together and then made searchable, in almost real time. Why does this matter?
1. Well, when a group of people converge for, say, a conference or a film festival, there is often a hashtag that is associated with the event. (And if there isn’t an official hashtag, then Twitter users will make one up.) When people tweet about their experiences of the event, they can add the hashtag to it and know that their tweet will be included when others search for the hashtag of the event. And why do others search for the hashtag? Because they want to join the conversation about what’s happening at the event! That includes people who are actually present to people around the world who are simply interested and want to be a part of the peanut gallery.
2. Hashtags also provide a way for people to spread news quickly about a particular topic or event. For instance, a few months ago when the humanitarian aid flotilla Rachel Corrie was en route to Gaza, I followed the hashtag #RachelCorrie and found out information, in nearly real time, about whether the ship had landed, whether it had been boarded by Israeli security forces, and the status of the passengers. #Flotilla was a second hashtag associated with that event. #FreedomFlotilla was a third. Big news events will often have several hashtags associated with them at the same time — it all depends on what people are tweeting. The brilliance of hashtags is that they provide an extremely effective means of searching for and filtering tweets, and this search will even update as new tweets come in.
#2010disappointments Search on New Twitter
3. Hashtags are also used as tweet themes or jokes on Twitter. For instance, today’s #2010disappointments is for people to tweet about, you guessed it, their disappointments in 2010. If you see a hashtag and you don’t know what it means or what it’s about, check out @wtt (or What The Trend?) to see what the prevailing definition (created by a user-generated encyclopedia) of the hashtag is. I think this is one of the more dynamic and interesting emerging qualities of Twitter.
4. Finally, hashtags are simply an interesting linguistic convention on Twitter. They both point out what people think are the keywords and topics in their tweets, and they often indicate commentary or asides on the tweet itself. For instance, from my recent tweets:
- circlesoffire What is #streetlit? Find out from one of the best radical librarians I know: “30 Days of Street Lit” at http://www.meganhonig.com #YA #libraries
I made “streetlit” into a hashtag, and also added the hashtags “YA” and “libraries” to it, outside of the conversational flow of the tweet itself. I did this because I wanted anyone searching along those terms to read this tweet. You can make hashtags wherever there are words, both within and outside the phrasing of the tweet itself.
- circlesoffire The problem with banking by mail is that sometimes the checks really do get lost. #annoyed
So in this case, I use the hashtag #annoyed as a kind of meta comment about my emotional state about the content of the tweet. This one is pretty obvious and on-the-nose, but you can be as off-the-wall as you want in hashtags. Just remember that when you want to hashtag a phrase, you can’t insert spaces or punctuation. So, for instance:
- circlesoffire Yeah, Joss watching Warner make another Buffy must be like how Aerosmith feels every time they hear Dream On. #intellectualpropertylawsucks
When I read hashtags in tweets, especially this kind of comment/addendum-style hashtag, I often think of them as being what folks say under their breath or out of the corner of their mouth. It’s one of the ways that Twitter is communicating on different linguistic levels, some more direct than others. And personally, I enjoy wordplay like this so I’m into it.
What are those weird small URLs I keep seeing?
They are called short URLs. They are used as gateways to longer URLs. One such free service is bit.ly. You copy the full URL you want to shorten, go to http://bit.ly, paste it into the field and hit “Shorten.” It generates a unique short URL that will forward to the original page. Not only is this great for making links fit in your 140 character limit, but if you take your new bit.ly link and add a “+” to the end of it, you can go see all the bit.ly statistics for that link — how many people are clicking it, where they are coming from, etc. It’s a nice, free tracker. There are many other options for URL shortening, such as Hootsuite’s ow.ly, Twitter’s t.co, Facebook’s fb.me and others — I just happen to like bit.ly the best.
Why do people repeat tweets all the time?
This phenomenon of repeating someone else’s tweet is called “retweeting.” There are two flavors — the manual retweet and the retweet button on Twitter. To manually retweet, the convention is to type “RT @username [the tweet to be retweeted],” where the username is the person who originally posted and the words in brackets are the tweet itself. I like to do this and add some kind of comment of my own alongside their tweet. For instance:
- circlesoffire Holy cow!! @rosspruden BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures. http://r2.ly/5zbv #infdist /via @davewiner ECCE HYDRA.
Now, at first, this may look like a lot of gobbledygook, but some of it should be familiar by now. My contribution is the “Holy cow!!” Then, I am retweeting (RT) my friend @rosspruden. The http://r2.ly/5zbv is a short URL. #infdist is Ross’ hashtag about “Infinite Distribution” or hybrid distribution strategies for independent artists. Then there’s the “/via @davewiner” which means that @davewiner is how Ross first saw this tweet. Now, I had to look up what “ECCE HYDRA” means, but I think its some Latin phrase meaning “and so birthed the hydra [multi-headed snake].” But honestly, I didn’t even bother to look that up until writing this — which is another by-product of Twitter filtering. It’s okay if you don’t understand everything — use what you need and move on.
However you change the content of a tweet (and that often happens as you tweak it to fit 140 characters when you pass it on), careful and correct attribution is one of Twitter’s unspoken rules of etiquette. This is especially true since repetition counts so much on Twitter. Above all else, Twitter is a network — when your tweet is retweeted by a handful of people, you have the possibility of exponentially increasing the number of people who read your tweet. When you retweet someone else’s tweet, you are expanding their network momentarily to include yours. Depending on how compelling the tweet is, people may become new followers of the original user, who may also follow them back. This is one reason why it’s so important to correctly attribute tweets. It’s also part of why people tend to thank folks for retweeting their posts — not only is it kind, but it strengthens the ties between you and the retweeter.
Retweet Button - Old Twitter
The second flavor of retweeting is a relative newcomer to Twitter — Twitter’s retweet button. By clicking this button (and confirming Yes when Twitter asks you if you’re sure), you instantly copy the entire original tweet into your timeline. If the tweet is already a retweet from someone in your network, Twitter will bypass that user and just show the original post. The major flaw with the retweet button is that it doesn’t allow for commentary or editing of the tweet, and it doesn’t create a new “mention” of the original user so that the user can see exactly who retweeted them in their mentions feed. You have to go into the Retweets section of the Twitter.com interface to see who’s retweeted your posts. I personally find this clunky and awkward, but it does have its uses. Basically, the retweet button makes retweeting that much simpler (and copy and paste was simple enough), so I think it probably encourages people to do it. It’s also true that it has an added benefit of slightly getting around the 140 character limit rule since retweet-button retweets don’t count the original user’s username in the tweet or the three extra characters that “RT” and a space take. For those of us who really tweet to the wire, this is a nice perk. [Please note: you will need to move your mouse over the area under the tweet to make the Retweet Button appear. The pictures here show the button already activated.]
Retween Button - New Twitter
All right, I’ll give it a shot. How do I get started?
Well, first go to Twitter.com and sign up for a new user name. Then tweet something! Then check to see if you know anyone on Twitter already — Twitter makes it easy to check against your email address book, if you like, or you can search for people by name. Then follow them and see what they are tweeting about. Reply to one of their tweets, and see if they reply to you. Then do a search on Twitter about a topic that you find interesting — and check out what people are saying. Listen. Think of it like a very large, very public cocktail party — and when you have something interesting to share, don’t hesitate to jump in!
I’d love to hear about how it goes for you — feel free to leave a comment for me here on this blog or write a tweet to me @circlesoffire. And be sure to check back for my next blog on Twitter: “But What Do You Tweet About?”