ANOMALY INCORPORATED

From the Department of Helpful Advice

Recently, I’ve been receiving a fair amount of questions that are all basically variations on the theme of “what is Twitter and how do I use it effectively?”.  After writing up a quick list of starter hints for a colleague, I ran across a similar question on Mahalo Answers, shared the same bit of advice, and wouldn’t you know it, got awarded the “Best Answer” nod. Yay us!

So, in the interest of making good use of by-products, I present the same advice here — I’ll follow up with a few opinions of mine regarding the state of the twitterverse in due course (the ecosystem is mature enough to undergo a thorough taxonomizing, IMO).

You can follow our web-and-business-related posts at @anomalyinc

Enjoy, and as always, HTH:

Step one: use TweetDeck:
http://www.tweetdeck.com/

It greatly simplifies searching, following, re-tweeting, etc, by giving you a “dashboard” that constantly updates various statuses. Warning: highly addictive…

As for General Tweetiquette:
- you reply by putting the @ sign before someone’s name in your tweet — for example:

@pdxgene thanks! that was a great lasagna recipe!

- you can and should include web links in your tweets. TweetDeck (among others) will automatically shorten them using a URL shortening service

- you can mention a subject or area of interest by including a hashtag, for example:

So glad this week is almost over! #tgif
or
Next door neighbors’ drumset is too loud! #getoffmylawn

- if you want to re-tweet (essentially, forward) someone’s tweet, you start it with “RT @username“, for example:

RT @pdxgene I’ve got two tickets to Led Zeppelin for sale cheap!

For what it’s worth, TweetDeck has automated buttons for replying, re-tweeting and direct-messaging people’s tweets, among a lot of other features.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.