Blogging and Tweeting Part 1

Twitter is used by a lot of people for a lot of things. There are some who use it to pointlessly update their activity every few minutes, and I must confess to being one of those people. Others use it as a free form of temporary communication. Yet others use it as a professional advertising platform for their product or business. You can do that too and I’m about to show you how…

The Drawing Board

First of all you need to establish the ground rules of Twitter lingo and tweeting syntaxes.

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  A tweet is a status update sent via Twitter. A tweep/twit is someone who uses Twitter. Using Twitter is known as tweeting. And Twitter is a micro-blogging website.
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  Mentions or @replies are tweets in which another user is mentioned. The correct syntax for this is an ‘@’ symbol and then the username of the tweep you wish to mention.
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  Trending topics are popular subjects of discussion across Twitter. You can see them in the sidebar of the Twitter homepage and click them to see related tweets.
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  A hashtag is a tweet which mentions a trending topic. They are so called because the syntax consists of a ‘#’ symbol succeeded by the trending topic itself.
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  To send a tweet hidden from public eyes you need to use direct messages. The correct syntax is a ‘d’ followed by an ‘@’, then the username of the recipient and your message.
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  A retweet is a tweet you like which you decide to share with your followers. Either use the retweet button or type ‘RT’, ‘@(username of original twit)’, then the tweet you liked.

That’s the bare essentials so go and practise if you’re a beginner.

Accounting

You need to decide whether or not you wish to make a standalone account especially for your blog while using another account as your main username. While I use @SteveWiilliams as my main account via which everything in my life is tweeted, @TOAOSW is especially for all things related to my blog.

I don’t post anything but links and post descriptions via @TOAOSW.

It’s a bad idea to mix your personal account with your professional account. There may be people following @TOAOSW who are specifically interested in the content of my blog but who don’t particularly give a fish about the size of my excretive toilet material. Yeah, like I said, I tweet everything.

The obvious problem here is having to manage both accounts.

That’s where third party applications come into the equation. More than three quarters of the Twitter population avoid using the website itself in favour of an unofficial program such as TweetDeck or Twhirl, the former of which is probably the best. Third party programs can simultaneously manage multiple accounts.

Next Time…

So, you know how to tweet, hashtag, send direct messages and retweet another’s tweets. You also know that it’s best to make two accounts, one personal and the other professional, which you manage simultaneously with a single application. Next time…

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  How to write good descriptive post summaries.
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  How to shorten URLs online and straight from your browser with extensions.
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  How to auto-shorten ULs.
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  How to make sure your tweets get noticed.

That’s all for part one in a three-part series!