Twitter How-to

From your computer Twitter.com

From your phone Twitter’s architects deliberately limited tweets to 140 characters, so that they could be sent and received as short message service text messages. (S.M.S. allows 160 characters, but the Twitter people left room for user names.) To operate Twitter by texting, login at twitter.com and click Settings, then go to Devices and add your phone.

At first, you’ll get nothing At first, you’ll get nothing. That’s because, by default, updates from the users you follow aren’t texted to your phone, so you don’t run up a bill. Instead, the interface at twitter.com adds buttons next to each user you follow, so you can turn updates on or off. You can tweet from your phone by texting a message to 40404.

Some things you need to know RT = retweet of someone else’s tweet # = hashtags. The category this tweet belongs in. Use sites like Twubs, a hashtag directory, and What the Trend?, a wiki that attempts to explain what certain hashtags (and other Twitter trends) mean, to locate and identify hashtags that make sense for your business. Also, pay attention to tags being used by your followers and search for them on Twitter to see what sort of tweets are associated with those tags. search.twitter.com = says it all. Use it for searching Lists = like http://twitter.com/meranduh/j-c that has all the tweets from J&C tweeters. Useful in PR to keep track of many sites. Tweetmeme = finds the most-shared content on Twitter based on retweets

If you like a tweet and want to preserve it for eternity, mouse over it. A star-shaped icon appears at the right of the text. Click that. Then, you can click the Favorites link on your home page to see all the tweets whose stars you’ve clicked, no matter how long ago you saved them. You can also go to other users’ pages and browse through their Favorites.

Photos You can’t send photos through Twitter, but you can send the URL for a photo hosted on a Web site. TwitPic plugs the gap with a Web site that both holds your photos and creates URLs for them. You login to twitpic.com with your Twitter username and password, then upload a photo from your computer. TwitPic forwards them to Twitter with the correct photo URL automatically appended.

Doing it all Desktop applications for Twitter are proliferating, a new one every day: Example: Tweetdeck.com, dashboard allows users to follow groups, track topics in real-time by keyword, organize tweets, @replies and Direct Messages.

Directories An exhaustive Twitter directory created by Diggfounder Kevin Rose called WeFollow allows journalists to find other news professionals or even experts by hashtag.

50 Ways to search Twitter

Working with Facebook Working with Facebook http://twitter.com/widgets/facebook Or Twitterfeed to sync your blog with your Twitter account

If you want to share a link to something, there are ways to “compress” the URL so it isn’t as long. All you have to do is copy the URL and paste it into one of these services: is.gd tinyrul.com bit.ly Or Google’s new URL shortener; Wordpress has one, also.