What is Twitter for?
• Real-time breaking news
• Finding people who share your interests
• Keeping in touch with friends, organisations and celebrities
The Basics
Each tweet cannot be longer than 140 characters
To find people on Twitter, create your own account. Then use the ‘find people’
option in the right hand corner to go to their Twitter pages. Then press the
"Add" link in the "Actions" box.
Once you have added some ‘friends’ (for example, tina) you can look to see
who they are following to get ideas on interesting people to follow on Twitter.
Use the command
@tina – write a message to @tina that everyone can see
DM @tina – write a message to @tina that only @tina can see (you must be
following each other to do this)
RT @tina – retweet a message that you think others may find
useful/interesting/funny
To search for topics use the search box on your own Twitter page.
Type in #meteorwatch – to find people who are really interested in having a
conversation about the meteor shower to be able to find this tweet (and vice
versa)
Tweets differ from emails in two ways: they are public – anyone on Twitter
can find and read.
Other Twitterers choose to “follow” your tweets and you, in turn, decide to
follow theirs. Tweets can contain links to other websites, documents or
pictures.
If you want to post a long URL (a link to a webpage) use a website such as
tiny url to shorten the link so it fits into the requisite 140 characters.
How do you find stuff on Twitter?
Search.twitter.com
Look in the trending topics (in the right hand column of Twitter) to find out
what the twittering population is tweeting about
“Find people” (top right of Twitter)
How do you know who to follow on Twitter?
• Look at their previous tweets.
• Contact them via their website/ @ or DM them to find out more
• Look at the following/followers ratio
• Look at their followers list. If they are respectable, they are likely to be
real.