I originally wrote the follwing as an email to a friend who had just joined Twitter and was feeling hopelessly lost – then I thought it might be of use to some others who would like to have a go but find it all a bit confusing. So here is my Twitter for Absolute Beginners lesson. I hope it’s useful. I’m a huge twitter fan – find me on there if you are too, I’m @jessruston – and a bit of an evangelist about it these days.
Twitter Lesson for Absolute Beginners
Right, so, you have registered, that is the first thing done.
Now you need to start following a few people. There are various ways to find people who you’d like to follow – the first is probably to allow twitter to look in your email to see who is already on there. So go to ‘who to follow’ in the black toolbar of the main twitter site; click on the ‘find friends’ tab, and you’ll see various options for it to go into gmail/hotmail etc. Click on the one you want to use, grant it access and then select whoever you find that you want to follow.
You can also find people by typing their twitter name directly into the toolbar or the search box. So, for eg I am @jessruston. Either go to twitter.com/jessruston or type me into the search box, and yoiu should see my profile page (the search on twitter can be a bit temperamental). Click on the green ‘follow’ button (erm, assuming you want to…) and – ta da! you are now following me.
Essentially, what this means is that when you go to twitter and log in, you will see my updates in your feed, as well as those of others that you follow. You can also see @replies between two or more people that you follow. @replies are how you direct a reply to someone in particular – so, if I put as my update ‘I am having my breakfast’, you might see that and type ‘@jessruston what are you having for your breakfast’ (and then promptly unfollow me for being so sodding boring). So, if you follow both me and, say, Polly Samson (@pollysamson) you might see an exchange of tweets between the two of us. You don’t see my replies to people that you don’t follow, unless you click on my profile page to read all of my tweets – they’re not hidden, they just don’t come up in your feed.
You can unfollow people at any time, of course, and their replies just won’t show up in your feed any longer. If someone is being weird (doesn’t happen often) or offensive, you can block them – this means that they won’t be able to see your profile or any of your tweets any longer.
On the main twitter site (there are other ways of using twitter, which I will explain in a minute),your main timeline is in the white box. To the right of the button that says ‘timeline’ there is one that says ‘mentions’. This contains all your @replies. If someone that you don’t follow @s you, it will appear here, not in your main timeline.
Then there’s a tab called Retweets. Retweeting simply means repeating a tweet that someone else has written to your followers. So, I might say ‘you is the most beautiful person I have ever seen’ and you, in a moment of immodest excitement, might retweet it. More usually, you might retweet things that you have read that you found funny, or links to interesting articles etc. Also, people can retweet your tweets.
Retweeting and reading others retweets is a big part of how people find new people to follow. If I retweeted a joke by someone that I follow, that you find especially clever, you might look at the profile of the original tweeter and decide to follow them. This obviously works both ways, and can be quite noticeable – if a ‘sleb’ twitterer with gazillions of followers retweets one of your tweets you are likely to get a sudden rush of new followers. Some people retweet hundreds of things and it becomes incredibly annoying – if you find yourself following one of these, you can either a) unfollow them or b) go to their profile, and next to the FOLLOW button there will be a little green button with arrows on it – clicking on it will stop their retweets appearing in your timeline.
The other main way you’re likely to find new people to follow is through watching the conversations of the people you already do follow, and joining in. So, if you follow both Polly and I, and we are chatting to, say, Sali Hughes (@salihughes), who you don’t follow, you might see us having a chat about slutty eyeliner (as this morning) and think, hey, that’s something I can join in with. So you do – and, hurrah, she replies saying your thoughts on slutty eyeliner are the most incisive she’s heard for a while, and you start following her, and she maybe starts following you, and all manner of chat about red lipstick and big hair waits you (she’s a beauty journo, and very lovely). Or, not – there’s no pressure to start following someone just because you’ve exchanged a few tweets with them.
So, that’s the basics. There’s other stuff like lists which you don’t need to worry about now. You’ll get the hang of it.
Re twitter clients – there are programs you can download and use to access Twitter rather than doing so through the main site. There’s one called Tweetdeck, one called Brizzly, one called Tweetie. I use Tweetie on my iphone and find it excellent. Some are Mac only, there will, I’m sure, be one for your Blackberry as well, but I know nothing about them. I’d start off just using the main site and see how you get on, then you can have a look at the options and see what might suit you. Or you can just stay using twitter.com.
