Twitter for Dummies (4 page)
Read Twitter for Dummies Online
Authors: Laura Fitton,Michael Gruen,Leslie Poston
Tags: #Internet, #Computers, #Web Page Design, #General
Twitter has also been a big help for community efforts. Whether it’s Amber Alerts, fundraisers, searching for kidney donors, or rescuing James Buck from an Egyptian jail (
http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/statuses/786571964
), Twitter has shone as a tool for social good. Plenty of people in the world want to lend a helping hand, and Twitter’s platform makes it easy, in real time, with a global network of connections.
For more on using Twitter for your business, turn to Chapter 11.
Businesses That Use Twitter
If individuals, community groups, and nonprofit groups, can use Twitter (as we discuss in the preceding sections), businesses large and small can use it, too.
Discount airline JetBlue uses Twitter to advertise fare specials, put out weather alerts, and conduct customer service (
http://twitter.com/JetBlue
). Coffee retailer Starbucks uses Twitter to connect with customers and spread company culture (
http://twitter.com/Starbucks
), as does online shoe retailer Zappos.com (
http://twitter.com/zappos
). Early on, computer manufacturer Dell started a Twitter account (
http://twitter.com/DellOutlet
) to promote special deals on returned equipment and has said that, as of December 2008, its Twitter account has generated over a million dollars in revenue. You can bet, Dell now has many more accounts:
www.dell.com/twitter
.
So why would a business want to establish a presence on Twitter?
To network with customers and see what they’re saying.
To answer questions.
To finely tool a company image.
To poll and pull in feedback.
To take advantage of an innovative form of 140-character advertising. If you have a limited quantity of something to sell in a short amount of time, you can’t find a better channel than Twitter to make it known.
Even a business with
no
customers on Twitter can take advantage of five off-platform benefits that we talk about in Chapter 11.
But none of these reasons really scratch the surface of why so many people use Twitter. Whether you want to use it for mostly personal or mostly business reasons, or even a blend of the two, you’ll find that your reasons for tweeting multiply over time while Twitter becomes more and more useful to you. Each chapter in this book clearly explains why Twitter has caught on like wildfire and how you can join in the fun (and enjoy the business benefits) of this microsharing service.
If you’re not sure where to begin, you’ll be glad to know that many professions are comparing notes about the best ways to use Twitter. For example, ExecTweets (
www.exectweets.com
) shines the spotlight on executives who use Twitter. You can find dozens of industry-specific blog posts and guides on how to use Twitter most effectively. Laura’s company started one list of these guides here:
http://pistachioconsulting.com/featured-articles/industry-guides
.
For more on putting Twitter to use for your business, turn to Chapter 11.
Getting Your Tweet Wet
Having breakfast and getting ready to ride. 6 hours today...
— Cyclist Lance Armstrong via Twitter, December 20, 2008
(http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong/status/1069006436)
When you log into Twitter, a question appears in large print across the top of the screen: “What are you doing?” The most basic activity on Twitter is to answer that question, whenever and however you feel like it. The beauty of this simple question is that you can answer it in so many different ways, and your answer can spark so many conversations.
While you get more comfortable using Twitter, you may find that you ignore the question of “What are you doing?” altogether. That’s okay. Twitter is inherently flexible and open-ended, so you don’t need to stick to a rigid set of rules. In effect, Twitter is what you make it.
The “What are you doing?” prompt can get some new Twitter users stuck in a rut. Sometimes, twitterers freeze up out of self-consciousness, concern that they’re not doing it right, or just plain old 140-character writer’s block. You know these Twitter accounts when you see them: The twitterers end up twittering only about what they had for breakfast, that they’re leaving the office to go home and watch
Heroes,
or various other mundane life updates that don’t spark much conversation. Many of these Twitter users don’t end up getting involved in the Twitter culture, and some then stop using Twitter altogether.
If you’re brand-new to Twitter and you’re ready to try it out, turn to Chapter 2 for information on how to sign up, customize your profile, and adjust your settings. Chapter 3 fills you in on the Twitter.com interface — it’s sort of a road map of the site, so you know where everything is.
You can get much more value from Twitter — and have a lot more fun — if you just let yourself relax and talk about what’s on your mind. Passionate about aardvarks? Send out a few tweets with aardvark facts and see who talks back to you. Have a burning desire to change careers from accounting to roadie for a rock band? Talk about it! You can probably get a response or two.
How Twitter differs from Facebook
“Facebook is closed, Twitter is open. Facebook is structured, Twitter is scattered. Facebook is people you’ve known, and many you might have wanted to forget; Twitter is people you never knew, but might have wanted to meet. And because of all of that, barring an acquisition or failure to execute . . . Twitter will overtake Facebook and become the backbone of the real-time web.”
— Brightidea.com CEO Matthew Greeley (
@brightidea
)
If you’re a regular Facebook user, you may be wondering how Twitter is any different from the status updates that are part of Facebook. The main way in which Twitter differs from Facebook is that with Facebook, you’re broadcasting your status updates to people you’ve allowed to be your friend and view your profile on Facebook. On Twitter, you’re by default sharing your updates with the world. You can protect your Twitter updates so that only people you allow can see them, but that’s not very common. Instead, most people leave their tweets open to the public, which means anyone who’s interested in what you’re saying can follow you — and you can choose to follow them back or just ignore them. You don’t have to know the people you follow, and your followers don’t have to know you.
Replies work much differently on Facebook, and as a result, the system is much less dynamic. On Facebook when people reply to your status update, their replies appear with your update itself, which moves farther and farther down in the feed, until eventually it’s not even seen anymore. On Twitter, the most recent replies are always at the top of the stream, which means the conversation continues to be relevant and visited for as long as people are talking.
On Twitter, people frequently repeat your tweets for their own followers. It’s commonly called
retweeting.
If your band is playing at a club on Friday, you might tweet, “MyBand rocks out Blondie’s, 123 Main St, LA, Fri 9/3 @ 9 pm
www.myband.com
for tickets” If any of your followers want to spread the word, they might tweet, “RT @yourname: MyBand rocks out Blondie’s, 123 Main St, LA, Fri 9/3 @ 9 pm
www.myband.com
for tickets” That RT is shorthand for
retweet,
and by putting your name after RT, they’re letting their followers know you’re the one who originally posted it (and that you’re the one whose band is playing at Blondie’s). If you want to encourage people to retweet something, you can even put something like, “Please RT” in the tweet. What all this means is that your tweets can spread like wildfire, and you can get the word out (fast!) about the things you want to share.
It’s really striking to see how much faster, more easily, and farther messages spread on Twitter. Sharing and passing along information is what makes Twitter a sensitive global news detector, a powerful tool for social change or marketing, and an interesting and dynamic flow of ideas and information.
Tweeting Like a Pro
We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!
— Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, accepting Twitter’s Web Award honor at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March 2007
Simply put, a
tweet
is what you call the 140-character message that you send out onto the Web by using Twitter.
Why call it a tweet? It’s convenient, tying into the whole theme of birds chirping. Also, like much of the Twitter vocabulary,
tweet
is a term coined by the users, rather than the company — evidence of the playful loyalty that avid users have with the Twitter brand.
Twitter limits the length of tweets to 140 characters (letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces), a length that may seem short at first. And it is. How in the heck are you supposed to say anything in this tiny bit of space? How can you distill your company pitch into 140 characters, or review a book or movie by using so few words? With time, you get used to this length restriction. Perhaps one of the coolest things about Twitter is that the more you use it, the easier it is to write short, sharp, clear tweets. As you get more accustomed to tweeting, you find that squeezing thoughts into 140 characters often makes you refine the point in ways you wouldn’t have thought of before.