About communication

During the last days there have been quite a few friends I know from other social media who have come to follow me and my client Pål H. Christiansen on Twitter.

As some of them have asked me how to find their way around that place I have decided to blog about it in easy words instead of explaining it to each of them. Okay folks, here we go:

Other than the communities or social networks you know so far, Twitter is

• not a closed community
• not a chat (in the proper sense) or messenger
• not a social network like Myspace for example

Twitter is a microblogging system!

Twitterfeed of schwindt-pr

Which means:

• the updates you post on Twitter are summed up in a feed (= list of postings like in a blog or from a website)
• this feed is public! If you have protected your updates the feed is still public but people will see this:
  
• others who are on twitter can subscribe to your feed (= click the “follow” button”)
  
• others who are not on twitter can still subscribe to your feed (if its updates are not protected) by clicking the RSS-link on your profile:
  
• clicking the “follow” button is a one-way action – in contrary to other social media where adding a contact is always mutual (see previous blogpost)!
• someone you follow will get a message telling them about you following but that doesn’t automatically lead to them following you back! They decide if they want to do that and then need to click the follow button on your profile or in their followers list.

Important things to know:

1. If you want to address a tweet (= a posting on Twitter) to a certain person you start your tweet with @username. In contrary to what you are used to, it is necessary to use the exact spelling of the username if you don’t want your tweet to land in the Replies-folder of someone else!
2. If you want to reply to someone’s tweet you don’t need to type the @username. You can just click on the arrow that appears if your mouse over that tweet:
   
3. All tweets someone else has sent to you beginning with your @username (see 1.) will end in your “Replies”-folder (see your sidebar, it is called “@Replies”). So have a look there regularly to make sure you don’t miss a tweet that has been sent to you.
4. Tweets that contain your @username but don’t start with it are NOT listed in your “Replies”-folder! But you can find them using the twitter search tool searching for username (without the @ sign).
   Which also means a tweet that contains several @usernames will only land in the “Replies”-folder of the one mentioned at the start of the tweet. So if you want everyone to get the tweet in their folder, you need to write a tweet for each of them and always start with their @username.
5. You can send so called “dm” (= direct messages) that are like the private messages you know from elsewhere. These messages can only be seen between you and the recipient.
6. Tweets must NOT be longer than 140 characters! Otherwise they get cut! Remember, this is MICROblogging!
7. Links on twitter should be shortened for this reason. You can use free services like tinyurl for that. That is why links always look so strange on Twitter:
   

Besides that I have explained some more things about using Twitter on this blog before (please read that).

And if you have further questions then post a comment here or tweet me!