I think a lot of people are scared of Twitter a little bit because they see the messages are like “what in the hell does any of this mean?!” So let me give you a crash course in twitter.
What is Twitter? – Twitter is basically status updates (called Tweets) like you would see on Facebook. For example: “Joe is going to train”. Unlike Myspace, Facebook, etc, you don’t have “friends”. With “friends” its a two way relationship. You see their updates and they see yours. On twitter its “followers”. You can follow someone… they can follow you… but they are completely independent of one another. I think I have like 9,500 followers that see all of my updates. I only follow about 100 people though… so I only see updates from the people I care to see updates from.
However, in addition to your “home feed” which is where all the people you follow show up… there is also a “mentions feed”. The mentions feed is how people send messages to someone that doesn’t follow them.
My username is joelauzon… so my twitter address is http://twitter.com/joelauzon. Whenever someone does an @ and then a username… that mentions a user. It makes a link to that user in their update that can be clicked, and the message shows up in that persons mention feed. So…
When someone tweets “Whats up @joelauzon?”, it shows up in my mentions feed. I can then reply to them or retweet them. Lets say the person that mentioned me was the UFC account.
If I hit reply the status update starts as… @UFC because I need to mention the UFC account so they see it because I can’t assume they are following me.
If I hit retweet the update would start as RT @UFC What’s up @joelauzon?
RT stands for ReTweet. I would put whatever I wanted to say before RT… so to say “Just Training a lot” it would look like: Just Training a lot RT @UFC What’s up @joelauzon?. This is the most common way conversations work because that way people know what you are replying to. If someone asks a question and you just reply “yup” they dont have any idea what’s going on. So you retweet and people know what you are talking about.
Retweets can also show up as: What’s up @joelauzon (via @UFC) Just Training a lot. It really depends on the program/website/or whatever you are using to access twitter.
Keep in mind… everything on Twitter is public. All your normal updates can be seen by anyone and nothing private should be sent on twitter. There is a direct message feature… but I won’t even get into that on this.
Now… if you don’t have a twitter account because you were scared… go sign up for one. And Follow me: http://twitter.com/joelauzon