Oct 29 2009
Twitter 101
A friend asked me what this Twitter malarky was all about – I gave her some hints – I thought I’d share this further.
It isnt very obvious to begin with is it. In simple terms, you write little messages about anything you wish – up to 140 characters. You can update your status either through the twitter website, by a text message, via a 3rd party desktop twitter application (like TweetDeck) or a mobile platform application, depending on what kind of mobile you have.
Then, you can begin to follow other tweeters – and their messages will appear on your timeline. You can reply/refer to your followers, or anyone in fact by mentioning their username in your tweet but you have to prefix it with a @ sign – for me you could tweet ‘Hello @BruceElrick how are you?’ I would be notified of this tweet and could reply.
Another thing that grew organically with twitter users, was the re-tweet. If you like a tweet, and would like to alert your followers to it – you copy the tweet and prefix it with RT. If you are using a twitter application, they build in this functionality to make it easier.
And the last thing to tell you about are hashtags and trends. You have millions of people on twitter all tweeting about all sorts of topics, you may want to follow these trends or topics – so hashtagging evolved to make it easy for people to collate all the tweets on a certain topic. Hashtags evolve organically in the twitterverse.
Say for example – tomorrow, Gordon Brown threw up during an important speech – within seconds people will be twittering about this, and someone will use a tag that quickly becomes the one everyone else uses – it might be something like #brownsick. So, you may tweet ‘Oh my, poor Gordon, did you see that? #brownsick’
This would then become a trending topic, as millions of people would be using the same tag – and by typing the tag into twitter, you would see all the tweets on this subject.
Hashtags are often hijacked by spammers – as they know their tweet will be seen by millions, this is quite annoying. Also, you get odd things trending out of the blue for ‘fun’ these are annoying and juvenile too, people expect that twitter will address these annoyances soon.
Your industry TV, has fully embraced Twitter. Most programmes now encourage live programme twitter interaction. The first programme to really get into this was Channel 4’s ‘Surgery Live’ it was the top twitter trend most evenings it was on.
BBC Question Time is now in on it – and progs like Strictly and X-Factor are massive on twitter, with the shows using it as a live feedback loop and for competitions.