Tag Archives: tweets

How to Use Twitter

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Yes, of COURSE you’ll be doing Twitter soon, so might as well jump on the bandwagon now.  Below are the instructions to the extent you need any – Twitter is, if nothing else, very easy to use.

The normal phases of Twitter adoption are

1. “Wow, Twitter is  stupid!”  2. Hmm, lots of people LIKE Twitter. 3.  I wonder how you do Twitter?   4. I’m tweeting, I’m tweeting!  WooooHooooo!”

I’m assuming you are here in stage 3 of the process and that you realize it’s best to just jump in and do this and there really aren’t any formal “rules” so here you go with general ideas:

HOW TO USE TWITTER: 

1.  Sign up at www.Twitter.com    Easy, takes 2 minutes.

2.   By clicking the follow tag on a person, you should follow a LOT of people (hundreds at first, eventually thousands) who share your interests plus any friends you know who are doing Twitter.   If you are like me, also follow people who don’t agree with you.   I think the best approach is to find interesting people for a topic and follow their followers – this is MUCH FASTER than following people one by one (UNDERSTAND THIS POINT or you’ll spend too much time waiting to follow and click!)

Don’t worry about being picky, just click up to 500 per day until you hit the 2000 limit.   This will only take you about 10 minutes per day.  Don’t worry, you’ll be surprised how LITTLE activity there is on Twitter even with lots of followers.   I, for example, spend only about 10 min a day with it unless I’m bulking up followers – then I’ll spend 30 minutes following and unfollowing those who do not reciprocate.     Unlike Facebook, Twitter is not much of a time sink unless you get obsessed with it.   It’s partly for this reason it’s such a great business tool.

One of the neat things is that you can pretty much post what you like, there really aren’t many protocols.  Until you have a lot of followers (and even then), you’ll be surprised at the low feedback.  I use and see Twitter as more of a public soapbox for shouting than as a serious communications tool, though I love it when it becomes serious as when I’m complimenting a business or reporting a problem, or when I’m an insider to international twitter activity as during the ongoing “Arab Spring” where heroic folks are keeping the flame of freedom alive using Twitter and other social media.

Arab spring is only one example of people using Twitter very seriously.    YOU can take your cause and post links to your pictures (if they are public), make a comment, and then use a tag like this:  #PutAnyTopicHere         .
Using tags allows people searching for that topic in the tag to see your tweets.    Otherwise and in general only your followers will see what you write.
Retweet tweets you like that others make by simply clicking “retweet”.   This is nice for them and also helps you get “noticed”.
Summary of “How to Use Twitter”:
Join,  TWEET,  change the world.

FourSquare, Twitter, and Facebook

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As a self-proclaimed social media expert  (hey, cuz I have a MASTERS DEGREE in Social Science!), I like to think I understand what is driving the latest wave of online enthusiasm.    But I’m increasingly convinced nobody understands it.  Rather, like evolution, we work away from failure and wind up with applications and websites that have *survived* and adapted far more than were “brilliantly planned and executed” according to some online success formula.

Of course predicting Google’s success was easy – they’d cracked the nut of “really good search” and even as others caught up to their quality they’d established our habit of “googling” when we needed good info fast and have reaped the enormous advertising revenue rewards from that early success.     I had more trouble understanding why Facebook was so appealing yet it has thrived as the key friend and family connector in an increasingly social media world.

I remain skeptical that Facebook can drive advertising revenue to the extent needed to ever compete against Google for online dominance, but we’re still *very* early in the big online game and clearly Facebook is rocking in terms of online influence.

As for many, Twitter didn’t impress me initially but after following a lot of people and capturing a lot of followers I started to understand how important Twitter would be to the online social experience.     This was borne out very strongly at CES Las Vegas watching how quickly businesses – even including non-tech businesses like the hotels and attractions in Las Vegas – were using Twitter as a key news, customer contact, and customer relations tool.    As mom and pop businesses and “regular folks” begin to understand how active engagement with Twitter can revolutionize the way we do business communication I think we’ll see a second explosion in use and Twitter will rival Facebook in terms of importance.

The latest in the pantheon of  very popular “social media” applications is called “FourSquare”.     The idea is to know the location of your friends and share your location as well as offer tips about everything from dining to attractions.    The basic idea is appealing and intuitive and the service appears to be exploding in popularity, though I’m finding it hard to use I think in part because I’m a rural dweller and things like this are more useful in urban centers where there are a lot more participants.   Still, it seems to me this only enhances Twitter somewhat, and is not really a major improvement over what we’d expect from more active use of Twitter, which I see as playing (eventually) the a role as an application that manages how people are relating to other people on an hour by hour basis.     Although it’s mostly early adopters who use Twitter in this way now, the fact that tweets are easier than a phone call means to me that eventually we’ll shift from calling to some form of text messaging, the most powerful of which is …. tweeting!

In summary I’m thinking that Google search will continue to thrive and dominate with Facebook and Twitter becoming the key tools for social interaction – Facebook more between friends and family and Twitter between businesses and celebrities and customers / fans.       That doesn’t leave much room for Foursquare to become huge, but the online social space has become so large that even a supporting role can be an auspicious one.

Anonymity is so … 1999

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Hoping to start some discussion here about the role (if any!) for anonymity in online environments, especially when people are pitching sales or services.     I’m starting to think I’m pretty much opposed to anonymous stuff in almost all circumstances because it fosters so many of the bad things in the online world, and helps in so few cases.

At Twitter on prominent guy was pitching for $50,000 in startup funding, then appeared to be retweeting his pitch via … at least one fake profile though I can’t be certain it was fake.    However there’s enough deception now at Twitter that it requires almost as much skepticism as we have for bogus email scams.    Skepticism is healthy and good but we need to *reduce it whenever possible* to create more effecient and safe business environments online.     There is *FAR, FAR* too much tolerance of scammers in their various and sundry forms even as search engines work very hard to eliminate those who seek to manipulate their search rankings.

Tangential point here:  Google – I’d argue very evil-y and non-Googley – worries far more about certain SEO tweaks that have little impact  on users than they do about lying and cheating scammers who deceptively advertise using adwords.     In fact we could not even resolve an issue a few years ago where our India Travel website was hacked and payments made to somebody else for adsense advertising.   Google is a lot more interested in protecting their advertisers [cough Cash Cow cough]  than protecting their publishers or their users.    This point is so rock solid I’d like to debate it sometime with a Google person, for although I have a lot of respect for them in some areas I’m pretty much tired to death of the idea they don’t value advertising dollars above pretty much all else.  There are now *thousands* of example of this.    That kind of hubris very deservedly hurt Microsoft’s reputation and it’s starting to hurt Google’s too, though in fairness they are unlikely to *ever* reach the level of opportunism we saw with Microsoft products and services.   In my book Google remains on balance “good guys” and are likely to stay that way – perhaps even as the competition from Bing.com and search upstarts heats up.

More on this Anonymity topic  after the feedback here I’m hoping for…

Tweets in Space from Nasa

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I’ve been writing a lot lately about Twitter for many reasons, but I think two very good examples of why Twitter represents a key social media breakthrough are the upcoming Twitter tweets from space by NASA astronaut Mark Polansky and last month’s contest for followers between celebrity Ashton Kutcher and CNN news.   (Kutcher won by topping a million Twitter followers first).      Note that NASA and Kutcher – arguably two of the more technically adept big name brands, are not using Facebook to push content and interact with fans, they are using Twitter.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter is a very open, interactive, public venue.    It’s almost ideally suited to superficial yet “somewhat intimate”  interaction with both a small and large audience, and I think this is the key brilliancy of Twitter.    It serves both as a messaging system with friends  or business associates but also as a kind of community public square that allows you to interact with millions of other people in an informal yet direct way.    Pushing out a note to the world via Twitter, especially if you have a lot of people following you, is likely to result in fast, often rewarding feedback.

For well over a decade  it has been clear that the internet is about *people* much more than it is  about technology or computers.   However it’s only in the last few years that the barriers to entry, the familiarity with the tools, widespread access to broadband, mobile phones, and more of the human components of the internet have come together in the necessary ways to push people ahead of technology as the key online consideration.   Twitter remains at the same time superficial and profound and is the culmination of that online socialization paradigm.    With only tens of millions using Twitter and over 200 million on Facebook there is clearly  plenty of  room for Facebook success, but I believe we’ll see Twitter continue to grow more rapidly and become the key global messaging tool – primarily because it’s so simple to use and much friendlier for mobile applications.

Yes, you should be on Twitter too and let me know so I can follow you!    Joe Duck on Twitter