Last week I talked about why you might want to Twitter. So I’m sure you’ve all jumped in and have been Tweeting ever since. Here are a few commands that will
#topic – I talked about this last week; it allows you to tag or add a subject to your message such as #worldseries for baseball fans (I made that up). The topics are very ad hoc.
FOLLOW username: turns on notifications for a specific individual (you’ll need to know their Twitter username)
LEAVE username: turns off notifications for a specific individual
DELETE username: deletes person from your following lsit
D username: sends a private message to a specific individual
@username: sends a public message to a specific individual; this message will archive in their replies tab, and be visible on your profile page
WHOIS username: returns bio info for a Twitter member
GET username: returns the last update from a specific individual
FAVE username: marks the last update of a user as a favorite
INVITE number/email: invites a friend via SMS/text message to join Twitter
STATS: returns statistics
ON: turns phone notifications on
OFF: turns phone notifications off
Good uses of Twitter http://twitter.com/
Last week I spoke to a group about Twitter. The big question was – why would I ever want to use it. Some folks used it with friends but couldn’t see a business use. So I wanted to outline some good uses.
First some Twitter basics: Twitter is like micro-blogging. You can publish messages up to 140 characters long. People sign up to get your messages; and you can sign up to get theirs. You can access Twitter from your computer or from your cell phone.
Twitter as Broadcast Tool
- Imagine the Department of Transportation sending out updates and accidents and construction
- Imagine a friend sending out updates of speed traps
- Imagine a restaurant (such as Punch Pizza) sending out 2-for-1 pizza offers on a wintery day
- Imagine someone sitting in legislative session and sending out updates of what’s happening
Twitter for Conversation
- Imagine going to a conference and being able to send messages back and forth to other conference attendees
- Imagine not attending the conference and still being able to follow the sessions through others’ messages
- Imagine doing a search on a topic to find out who else is discussing/thinking about it right now
- Imagine watching others discuss topics to see what’s going on in your field
Next week I’ll talk about more Twitter shortcuts – but one that has come up for me in the last week is the hashtag (#). You can use # to add a subject to your post. So if you’re Twittering at the NFOIC conference, you might add “#nfoic09” to each post and it would be easy for other Twits to find you and join your conversation. If I were holding a conference I might assign/suggest a tag for everyone to use. It’s a great way to get folks involved before, during and after the conference.
Yesterday I gave a presentation in Duluth. It was a fun group of nonprofits who were interested in why someone might want to blog or Twitter. (Learn more about the group here: http://twitter.com/techtues
I thought I’d share the presentation with Byte Readers:
Also there was a follow up question:
How can I find people on Twitter?
There is a people search http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter – which is very OK. It really depends on the amount of info your Twitter friend has provided. The advanced Twitter search can also be helpful: http://search.twitter.com/advanced. (It allows you to search by location.)
Also people wanted more info on promoting blogs and Tweets. I thought I had a post on that but I’m not finding it – so that will be my post week.
