Twitter Week continues with explanations and examples of different types of tweets. Let’s go!

1. A Straight Tweet –  This tweet is about as plain, and badly written, as you can get:

This tweet is a good example for several reasons. It illustrates the importance of proper spelling and grammar, specially when you’re tweeting from a company or website. If you’re on your own, using a personal account, this is important too but it’s vital when you’re tweeting from a business. After reading this tweet, would you be inclined to follow @TravelnKids? Probably not.

2. A Complicated Tweet – Here is an example of the other end of the scale, a tweet that is a mishmash of all kinds of things:

 

Hopefully, your tweets won’t look like this. Again, this is from someone/some company that should know better. It is a retweet that is directed at two people (@DBaird13 and @Blocpower), has two hashtags in it (#socinn and #poptech) as well as a link. We can tell it’s a retweet because it says so underneath. Jessica Richman has simply hit the retweet button below the original tweet. This is a bit like gossip, you are simply repeating what someone else tweeted.

As far as busy tweets go, this one wins the prize. Heck, it even has a shortform in it ($). We aren’t sure what the point of it is so you should take note of tweets like this and refrain from doing the same thing. Keep things simple, make sure the words are spelled correctly and take a moment or two to sound your tweets out in your head. If they don’t make sense to you, how are they going to influence anyone else?

3. A Directed Tweet – Look at this tweet:

This tweet is a directed one. See the @joncamfield at the start? The person who tweeted this, Jilian C. York, specifically mentioned another Twitter user, actually two, first thing in her tweet. Who can see this? As it is, only the three people mentioned in the tweet. There are other parameters involved in this but it gets quite complicated. Your followers, for instance, wouldn’t be able to see a directed tweet unless they follow both you and the other person.  Because the @joncamfield is at the very start of the tweet, it’s completely different than if @joncamfield was halfway through the message. Had that been the case, all of your followers would be able to see it. OK, let’s move on to something that will make every directed tweet visible to your followers.

4. A Directed (but Public) Tweet – Another example for you:

This little trick opens up a directed tweet to everyone who can see your tweets, not just the people who follow both parties. Just add a period at the start, just before the @ symbol, and everyone who follows you will be able to read it. Cool huh?

On the surface, Twitter might seem a bit complicated. As we were writing this, we realized that there are bits and pieces of Twitter that can confuse both new users and supposedly skilled users, as we saw in the first two examples above. All of that aside, Twitter is certainly worth looking into, even if you’re not going to tweet. Follow some celebrities or companies that you deal with and you’ll start to see how powerful this particular social media site is. It’s instant, it’s personal and it’s very educational. Give it a shot.

Thanks for reading! Next up are some tips on a few ways to use Twitter that will enhance your experience. Stay tuned. Like our Facebook page and keep up on our posts and tech tips. Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook.