Last day of Twitter Week. Here’s a short post on how to get around the Twitter interface. Interface, in case you don’t know, is ‘what’s in your face’ when you’re on Twitter. Some people use the term ‘GUI’ (graphic user interface) but Twitter’s version is big on words, not icons. Here we go!

From left to right: Home: Your main page. Tweets from the accounts that you follow are under the word Tweets. Your details are on the left, including the number of tweets you’ve made, how many accounts you follow and the number of accounts that follow you. @Connect: Press this button to see who has sent you a tweet, who has favorited one of your tweets and who has mentioned you in a tweet. Press @Connect once a day to see what interactions you have with other Twitter users. It takes a while to get to a level where you have any interaction but it’s fun when someone notices you. #Discover: We don’t use this at all but you might find it handy. When you press #Discover, you are fed information that Twitter thinks you’d be interested in. They suggest people, topics and accounts that they feel match your profile or your interests. Me: Basically this is another page which shows you everything the Home page does plus it gives you the opportunity to edit your profile:

This is the menu you see when you press Edit Profile:

Settings (the gear icon): Just to the right of the search window is an icon that looks like a gear, your usual Settings button. Here’s what you can access when you press it:

From top to bottom: Direct messages are messages that can be sent between users who follow each other. Unless both follow the other, neither one can send a direct message. This prevents spam on Twitter but, and this is important, don’t abuse this feature. Whatever you do, don’t send a DM (direct message) to people as soon as they follow you. If you have something to say, fine, just don’t send messages to say things like ‘thanks for following me’. That’s tacky. Lists are just that, lists of the people you follow arranged into groups. If you get to the point where you are following a few hundred people, the twitter feed becomes overpowering. Break those accounts into groups, then look at one group at a time. We’ve shown you how to make lists in this post: Twitter Lists  Lists are the only way to make sense of hundreds of random tweets. Help  is self-explanatory. Keyboard Shortcuts brings up this menu:

Settings will open this page:

Sign out is obvious, isn’t it? That’s pretty much it for Twitter. The more you use it, even just to read tweets from other accounts, you’ll begin to feel much more comfortable with it. Is it worth it? We think it is, depending on how current you want your conversations with others to be. Why is that important? It’s not really but if you do the cocktail circuit or gather with friends socially, it might be good to appear comfortable with different topics that are going on in the world. By that we don’t mean pop singers and movies, unless these are popular with friends, but news and views about politics, history, art, science, etc. Depending on the credibility of the accounts you follow, you could keep up to date on just about everything by devoting a bit of time each day to Twitter. The ‘news’ items you see on Facebook are rarely cutting edge and can be totally false or very outdated. Twitter tends to be what’s happening now. Thanks for reading. If you have comments or questions, use the form below to contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

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.