Tweeting away – Basic Tips and Tricks – Part I
What is a Retweet?
Retweet is twitter equivalent of “Fwd” option in email.
When you see an interesting tweet in your stream, you can twitter it again and share it with your followers, calling it a Retweet. Since you are ought to give some credits to the originator of this twitter, you can put “RT” and originator’s name beginning with a “@”. RT is short for ReTweet.
In twitter language @somename is referring to somename’s profile. This automatically creates a clickable url pointing to the somename’s profile.
Let’s see with an example, here are a few good quotes or jokes that you may want to retweet.
Quote 1: My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure. – Abraham Lincoln retweet this!
Quote 2: Great changes may not happen right away, but with effort even the difficult may become easy. – Bill Blackman retweet this!
Quote 3: What counts is not the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog. – Eisenhower retweet this!
Quote 4: There’s always free cheese in the mouse traps, but the mice there ain’t happy. – Anonymous retweet this!
You may click on any of the Retweet this urls to Retweet these quotes.
What is a reply tweet?
Reply tweet is equivalent to “Reply” function in email – with one major difference, that your Reply tweet is visible to everyone following your twitter stream.
You can create a reply tweet in response to any of the tweets in your stream. You can click on the reply button. The reply is like a normal tweet, starting with @somename the originator of the tweet. The reference url of the tweet you are replying to is automatically added below the published tweet.
For example, I saw an interesting message on my stream, and I want to reply:
Replying to a tweet
You can click on this reply button to create a reply tweet.
Once this reply tweet is published, any user can click on the reference url to check out the original
Why should you Retweet or Reply?
Retweeting or Replying helps you build more followers. Lets see how:
The basic reason to retweet is to spread some interesting information. Everyone on twitter may have different network of followers. When you get some information in your stream, you may like to share it with your followers – who may have missed out on that information.
Replying is to share your suggestions, agreement or disagreements on a twitter you noticed.
Retweeting and replying are good ways to build up conversations, which may interest other users to join in. If you are talking about something interesting, people are more likely to click on your name and become your follower. So, it can also help you get noticed.
Having a lots of followers on twitter can help in many ways, and we will talk about it in another article soon.
Tagging your twitters (Hashtag)
Hashtag (”#”) is a way to create communities or sharing or tracking a common topic on twitter.
You can twitter about a current topic or start your own by tagging your tweets. A hashtag sign (”#”) can be put in front of a descriptive word, much like we tag our blog posts or put color codes on our notebooks. You can tag your twitter by using “#topic” syntax within your tweet’s text.
For example, say you are listening to last.fm and want to tweet about your song something like this
“#lastfm Listening to Reba McEntire, check out http://bit.ly/5PyjL” – You can click here to tweet this.
Now, click here to see your tweet in a related topic search (may take few seconds to appear).
A tagged tweet can be easily found when somebody searches for twitter topics using http://search.twitter.com. Many twitter based services use twitter search to get live stream on a particular topic.
Again, this may help your tweets appear in a popular stream, other than your followers’ pages and get noticed. You can be branded as an expert on this particular topic.
What is a Direct Message?
A direct message can be sent to any person who is following you. Unlike a Reply tweet, a direct message is not visible to everyone, but only to the receiver.
For example, To send a direct message to me, you need to go to my twitter page – http://twitter.com/deangrover and click on the “message deangrover” link in the sidebar.
If you are not following me, you will not see this link. You can click on “Follow” button first, once I receive this notification, I will start following you back, and we can both then exchange “direct messages”.
Direct Messages are a good way to get individual attention. Unlike twitters, your direct messages are more likely to be responded as they are stored to a user’s inbox. A user may get 1000s of twitters over the day, but is likely to get only a few direct messages.
Changing Background image on Twitter to get more noticed
You can use the background image on Twitter as a Business Card. Twitter doesn’t allow any other form of customization – other than background or font colors. Putting up a background image can be the only way to put some customization on your twitter home page.
You can use any imaging software – easiest one being “MS-Paint” on windows.
You can sure check out some more interesting tips and tricks on using Twitter in my next few articles. Follow me on twitter for updates – http://twitter.com/deangrover