Twitter Basics, the 2 Minute Guide for New Users
Last week Alex Kawas and I taught a workshop on Twitter and blogs to a room full of healthcare professionals at the Center for Health Leaders, based out of UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. I realized about a minute into the workshop that there isn't a explanation of Twitter for the beginner that is easy to understand and just enough to get someone started on the platform but not so information much it's overwhelming. This post is intended to be just enough information for a person who has never used Twitter before to start- and learn along the way.
The way I started thinking about Twitter and a simple tweet was IM'ing or texting a group of people at the same time with the same information. This information could be a sentence or a link. Just start with that IM idea in mind when you are writing your first tweets.
Here's my very quick guide to Twitter and what all the commonly used symbols and characters mean. I've included links to deeper explanations of each term but this is really meant to be a 2 minute guide and not an exhaustive resource.
Definitions:
- tweet: communication of 140 characters that is sent through the Twitter service
- follower: someone who opts to receive your tweets
- follow: you opt to receive their tweets
- @<username>: a public reply to a specific person (e.g. @chiah for me), the tweet will show up in search, on the person's Twitter page (www.twitter.com/<username>, so for me, it would be www.twitter.com/chiah).
- DM or direct message: a private reply to a specific person, the tweet will not show up in search or on the person's Twitter page. You can only send a DM to someone who is following you and this IS NOT a reciprocal relationship, meaning if I am following @twitter they can send me a DM but since they are not following me, I cannot send @twitter a DM
- # or hashtag: a tag or keyword that will come up in search. Most often used to label a tweet as belonging to a certain event or topic.
- desktop or mobile clients: instead of going to twitter.com, you can use other interfaces either on a computer or on a mobile phone to see tweets
These simple terms should be enough to get started tweeting, for more detailed guides, Mashable has quite a few that will keep you busy for hours.
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