Twitter Tutorial
What is Twitter?
Twitter is an online social networking community that keeps people in touch through microblogging. Twitter allows people to communicate with each other usiing 140 characters or less in each method.
How to use Twitter
- Register for an account at twitter.com
- To broadcast a message to all of your “followers” type a message in the update box
- You can send messages directly to a user by putting a “d” in front of your update and put @ in front of the user name. “d @thehpalliance #Dumbledore taught me to value friendship.”
- You can reply to another user’s updates. If Snape says “I think #Dumbledore would enjoy some every flavor beans.”, you might reply “@Snape #Dumbledore had a bad experience with them one time.”
- You can also “retweet” a message. This is the same as forwarding an email. You would simply copy the message and put RT in front of it. “RT @Luna I’m going to go hang with the Thestrals. See you later!”
Another way to use Twitter is to spread the word about causes, events, issues, etc. Just put a # in front of the word that you want to highlight. This makes it a trending topic. Trending topics are monitored by the media to see what people are talking about. These topics can, and do, influence what is presented to the world as news. For WWDD, we are trending #Dumbledore. Examples are seen above.
You can access Twitter in several ways:
- Of course you can go to twitter.com
- There are a few programs that integrate Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites so that you can post to all through the same portal. Tweetdeck is one.
- There are some that are add-ons to internet browsers, like TwitterFox.
- Facebook also has an application that you can add that allows you to post from there.
- You can access Twitter from your mobile phone, too. Blackberry and iPhone both have apps.
