Twitter tips

This is the second part of my series of introductions to social media. The first was about facebook and you can find it here.

The idea of these posts isn't to tell you everything there is to know about social media, just to give you an overview of the most important things to know when starting from scratch if you've got little or no experience with the medium.

Today's post is about twitter.

Twitter is perhaps more daunting to approach than facebook, for someone new to social media. It has a lot of technical terms, such as tweet and retweet and url and so on that are used all the time on the website, that can be mystifying if you don't know what they mean. I'll try and explain as many of them as I can on the way through.

Setting up your account

Setting up an account on twitter is very easy. Start by heading to www.twitter.com and clicking on the button that says 'sign up'. The username that you create will be how people find and refer to you on twitter, so make sure that it's something that represents you well and is easy for people to remember. Good examples of twitter names might be PooleMuseum or NationalTrust. Bad usernames might be the name of the member of staff who created the account, or a complicated acronym. You'll also have a chance to write your name; this can include all the characters that your username couldn't, such as spaces. The rest of the sign-up process is quite straightforward; there is very little information to fill in.

Updating your 'look'

You are represented on twitter by five things. Firstly, your username and 'real name', which we've already covered. Next is your 'descriptive text'. Here you get 140 characters to describe yourself to the world at large. This is the only space you get to do this with, so make all those characters count. Usually it's good to summarise your institution with a sentence or two, then say who is tweeting on behalf of you if it's going to be one person. You might want a thesaurus handy to come up with shorter equivalents for things you want to say to get as much information into those 140 characters as possible! 

The other two are your avatar and your background. Your avatar is the little square picture that shows next to your username throughout twitter. It will be the visual representation of your institution, so you want to choose something that will stand out and be recognisable as you. You can change your avatar whenever you want, but it's probably best to keep it fairly stable. Museum logos make good icons, as do striking pictures of your notable collections if you have something particularly well known. It's worth knowing that although your avatar shows up as a small square most of the time, twitter users can click on your picture for a full-size version to get a better look at the image if they want to, so you don't have to use a tiny picture, or even a square one. If your picture isn't naturally square, twitter will automatically crop it for you.

Twitter has a wide range of background pictures that you can choose from, but you can also upload your own. If you choose a picture that is smaller than the screen size it is being displayed on then twitter will automatically tile the image unless you tell it not to. Cunning use of background colour and a picture that fades into it will help your page look good on any size monitor. If you're not sure, twitter's default backgrounds or plain colours work well to start.

Short and sweet

You'll know that one of the key characteristics of twitter is that each "tweet" (the messages or status updates that you post) can only be 140 characters long. One of the drawbacks of this used to be that it made including links to things difficult. Luckily, this is less of an issue now as twitter includes an automatic url (the address of a link) shortener. There are still plenty of separate ones out there that you can use; the likes of bit.ly and tiny.cc to name two. Their benefits often include click-through statistics tracking that twitter doesn't give you, but it's nice to know that twitter now offers something automatically so you shouldn't have to worry about links taking up all of your 140 characters.

I had a good suggestion in the comments from John Bibby so I'm adding it in here. If you do use an url shortening service, you are given the option of choosing what your shortened link appears as. Usually the abbreviation you wanted to use has been taken before. However, if you give yourself an acronym to use at the start of each shortened url, you'll probably find you can use whatever you like after it and still be unique. John uses aa42; you could use something that fits with your organisation, for example the V&A might use VnA as the start of all of their addresses, giving them shortened urls such as VnAart or VnAoffr and so on.

Retweet, retweet!

As well as "tweeting" your own posts, you can also "retweet" things that other people have said. Retweeting something is basically a way of saying you like or approve of something, or of raising awareness of something that other people want to be more widely known such as an event or a request for information. In the character-precious environment of twitter, retweet is often abbreviated to RT. To retweet a post, hover over it. You'll see icons for replying to the post, as well as one for retweeting it. The retweet icon looks a bit like a square recycling sign.

Talking to other people

No twitterer is an island; part of what makes twitter valuable is the conversation between people. There are two ways to talk to other people on twitter; by public tweet or by direct message.

A public tweet is something everyone can see. To make sure someone knows it's aimed at them, you put @Theirtwittername at the start of the tweet. This is like having a conversation with someone in a room full of other people; everyone else can hear (see) what you're saying.

A direct message is a private conversation between two people. You can get to your direct messages from the 'messages' tab in twitter. Type in the twitter name of the person you want to send the message to and away you go. Twitter keeps a log of all the people you've messaged in the past on the left hand side of the screen so it's easily accessible in the future. Bear in mind that though your message can't be seen by the public that doesn't mean the other party won't share it; think of it like sending email messages.



And that's it for the basics! I hope it's been useful to people. If people are interested in the more intermediate hints and tips, such as using programmes like TweetDeck and HootSuite to schedule tweets, or statistics tracking, let me know and I'll be happy to write a second post.

I haven't planned any more social media introductions at the moment, but I'm happy to write some up if people are interested in anything in particular. Foursquare, youtube... ask and I'll get writing!