Twitter 101

Unless you’ve been living in a cave you’ll know that Twitter is absolutely massive. On 14 March 2011 there were a measurable average of 140 million tweets per day, nearly tripling figures from the same time in 2010. In short, you should be on Twitter. This post will explain the ins and outs of twitter.

@mentions

A @mention is when someone sends a tweet mentioning your name. For example, if someone says “@yourname hello!”, it will appear in your “Mentions” tab. You can send and receive replies, which are viewable to the public, but not in their timeline unless they follow you too.

Follower

A follower is someone who has visited your account and press the “follow” button. They can see your tweets in their timeline, but you cannot see theirs without visiting their profile or following them back.

Following

Users who you follow will appear in your “Following” list. Tweets from these users will appear in your timeline, so only follow people who you will talk to and post tweets that interest you.

Direct Message

A direct message is a message that cannot be seen publicly. These will appear in your “messages” tab and you will receive an email. You can receive direct messages from people you follow but you cannot send a message to people who do not follow you.

Trends

Trends are the most popular things being discussed on Twitter in real time. These are commonly #hashtags but can also be normal words or phrases. The top 10 trends are displayed in the sidebar next to your timeline.

Hashtags

The easiest way to tag a tweet is to use a #hashtag. Hashtags in tweets become clickable, upon clicking a hashtag you are shown a list of every tweet mentioning that hashtag. This is extremely useful for competitions and following certain events. For example it’s very likely that EventName (for arguments sake) in 2011 would have the hashtag “#EventName2011″ so everyone tweeting about the event would have an easy way to find and index these tweets.

Lists

A massively underused feature of Twitter is Lists. You are able to add users to, be added to or follow “Lists”. Lists show tweets of the users who are listed. For example, you could have a list called “SEOmoz Team”, add all of the SEOmoz staff and only see the tweets of these users whilst viewing the list.