Chapter 17
In This Chapter
Taking the measure of Twitter
Using Twitter
Customizing your account
Bringing Twitter and your blog together
Over the last few years, Twitter has progressed from a confusing niche platform to a mainstream tool. Even so, that doesn't mean that you don't have questions, so this chapter gets down to brass tacks.
Twitter (www.twitter.com
) is a free social network used for micro blogging, which is essentially blogging, but in very short form. How short? Well, on Twitter, your posts are limited to 140 characters — barely enough for a couple of sentences. If you use Facebook, you may be surprised to know that you're already familiar with micro blogging.
Although you can post only up to 140 characters of text at a time on Twitter, you can use it to share photographs and links, even videos. Many businesses have jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon and use the tool to tell their customers about sales, specials, and other news.
Twitter started in 2006 and grew slowly into the phenomenon it is today. It's fundamentally difficult to explain both its popularity and its purpose; as with blogs themselves, some very logical and commonsense questions jump to mind for most people:
And in the case of people who already have a blog, the big question is, “Do I really need Twitter, as well?”
I hope you can forgive my answer to these questions: It's up to you! People use Twitter for all kinds of reasons. I've seen Twitter accounts devoted to spiritual guidance, sports, sex, marketing, web development, and diaries. You name it, and someone is using Twitter to talk about it. So, explaining why you should use Twitter, and what you might get out of it, is pretty hard to do!
One example of how a blog uses Twitter is Foodists (www.foodists.ca
), which regularly alerts readers to restaurant openings, food markets, tastings, and, of course, to the blog when new posts are available. In Figure 17-1, you can see the Foodists Twitter profile page (www.twitter.com/foodists
).
The Foodists Twitter updates are also displayed on the blog, ensuring that the audiences for both the Foodist main blog and its Twitter micro blog know what's going on. The goal of having both a blog and a Twitter account is pretty simple: Get more readers by producing different kinds of content in different web formats.
For most Twitter users, the first goal is communication, quickly followed by reaching out to more people in a format that they can use easily (and for free) and that reaches people very quickly.
Here are just a few ways in which individuals and businesses are putting Twitter to work:
Twitter updates have a lot of potential to inform and entertain. To get a sense of the mechanics of using Twitter, follow these basic steps:
When you set up your account, you can choose to share your updates — called tweets — with anyone (meaning the public) or to restrict access to only the people you choose to allow to follow you.
If any of them are on Twitter, decide whether you want to follow their updates.
You can tweet about anything, from news about your plans to any of your thoughts or activities.
Following someone on Twitter is equivalent to making that person into a friend or contact on other social networks; Twitter simply calls those folks who read your updates followers. As with other social networks, the number of followers you have indicates your popularity, and a lot of people focus on getting those numbers high.
The really neat thing about Twitter is that you can participate without ever visiting the Twitter website. Twitter is designed so that you can handle the whole thing by mobile phone apps, keeping you updated with a device that you probably already have close to hand.
I'm a big fan of learning by doing, so in the following sections, I walk you through signing up for Twitter and getting started. I get the easy job — getting you started with Twitter. You have the hard job of figuring out what to tweet about!
Follow these steps to set up a Twitter account:
www.twitter.com
.
The Twitter home page opens.
You're limited to 20 characters in this field.
Twitter loads the Create an Account page, which confirms the information you already provided.
Unlike some social networks, you can change your username later.
Your username is limited to 15 characters, and while you type in your desired username, Twitter checks to see whether it's available. If you don't get a green OK message (see Figure 17-2), try again until you find an available username.
Twitter creates your new account and loads the Who to Follow page. You also receive an e-mail that contains your new account information at the address you used to sign up.
After you set up your account, you can let Twitter help you find friends, family, and colleagues who are also Twitter users by giving the service access to your contact lists in Gmail, Yahoo!, or AOL. If you don't have contact lists with any of these tools, click the Skip This Step link at the bottom of this screen.
To let Twitter access your contact list in an online e-mail tool and find people to follow, follow these steps:
Twitter loads a login information screen.
Twitter doesn't keep this information; you're granting the company only one-time access to your contact list.
If you are already logged into the service you use for contacts, Twitter gives you a screen requesting access to the service.
Twitter connects to the service and loads your contact information, matching the e-mail addresses from your list against the e-mail addresses of other Twitter users.
You can always add more people later.
If you prefer not to follow any of these popular Twitter users, simply click Finish without selecting any of them.
Twitter loads your personal home page, which displays messages from all the people you're following.
After you sign up for a Twitter account, it's time for the fun part — your first tweet! You can send a tweet pretty darn easily from the website. Follow these steps:
www.twitter.com
and log in to Twitter if you aren't already logged in.
Twitter loads your personal home page, which displays messages from all the people you're following.
While you type, watch the number at the bottom of the field; it tells you the number of characters still available.
Twitter posts your tweet into your message stream, where your followers can read and respond to it. If any of them subscribe to your updates with their phones, they receive a text message that contains your tweet.
Posting a tweet is just the beginning. Other kinds of messages include the following:
@b4dbook i’m reading your chapter on Twitter right now!
that makes so much sense! RT @dbarefoot On a similar bent, there’s a great quote about creativity being something plus frequent iteration.
You can personalize your Twitter home and profile pages in a lot of ways, and you can update your account information, change your username and password, and so on. You can make all these changes on the Settings page, which you access by clicking the down arrow drop-down menu next to the gear icon at the top right of any Twitter page. The Settings page includes the following areas:
Many bloggers have set up a system that automatically tweets about their blog posts as soon as they are published. One such tool is called Twitterfeed (www.twitterfeed.com
), but many options are available, from plug-ins to tools integrated directly into your blogging or even your favorite Twitter platform.
Setting up such a system is pretty simple, really. After your blog has an RSS feed (see Chapter 16), you simply direct your blog-sharing tool to connect the feed and your Twitter account. Whenever you post a new blog update, a tweet containing the blog post title and URL is added to your Twitter feed.