Twitter newbie tutorial

Twitter is an information service that allows you to send and receive short messages (called tweets) within your Twitter community.

Your Twitter community consists of the following sections:

Following: You follow (follow) friends. By focusing on other Twitter users to build your Twitter community, you can see every tweets posted by your friends.

Followers: Follow (follow) your friends. A typical user can read your tweets to decide if they want to follow you, and your followers can track every message you post.

What is Tweets?

Tweets, also known as Twitter messages, are very short, only 140 characters, so they are very easy to read.

The official Twitter instructions for Tweets are used to answer the question "What are you doing?". Of course, we are not limited to this when posting news. You can also use it to answer "What are you thinking?" What are you thinking about?)".

Maybe you will think it is very boring to see what people have eaten or about their traffic. Fortunately, a lot of tweets are not just about this. Instead, you can learn about some of the big events from your followers, as well as small details about the business and their personal lives.

Twitter is like a party

Twitter is a new social service. You can't understand it completely before you use it. After you use it, there is no simple way to introduce this service to others. I think everyone has experienced it. Go through the same process to figure it out. Twitter is like a grand cocktail party.

• Twitter is like a conversation that you overheard when passing through someone at a grand party.

• For some special reason you invite some people to join your party. Whenever they arrive, they start to talk freely in the brain.

This metaphor can explain some of the features of Twitter well, but not all.

What kind of Tweet messages are people releasing?

The Tweet messages that people post are generally about what they think. Here are some examples of tweets:

Trivia of life: "I imagine that the street signs in heaven will be printed in Helvetica."

Interesting content: Today's Bacon Salt case study on Adweek underscores the 100% targeted nature of social media.

Newly released blog post: "Annoyed by outdated websites and abandoned blogs? Join the conversation"

Humorous events in life: "Who would have thought this granola-eating hippie with a liberal arts education would write a biz book? Life really is amazing."

Sense of thought: "I'm living proof that dreams can come true. I love my work/company/partner/employees. It's great to make a living doing what you love."

Exclusive: "The NYT included my website in a list of just FIVE recommended grammar blogs! Wow!"

"It's so hard to entrust work to others, and yet so rewarding when they come back with great results. I need to delegate more!"

"What if a fraction of the time spent talking about why social media is so spiffy and how to do it the bestest went into writing new content?"

Family life details: "Excited for my daughter who made the varsity soccer team as a freshman."

Twitter Truth: In February 2009, Twitter processed 2 million Tweet messages per day (Source: TweetStats)

Dynamic release. This is the most primitive usage of twitter, probably "what are you doing", all follow you can see your update information (set Protect my updates you will be followed by follow); You can follow anyone you are interested in. Twitter's "one-way broadcast" feature is very obvious; this is different from IM's "peer-to-peer communication" and "group communication."

recording. As an extension of the dynamic, you can use twitter as a daily recording tool, which can be considered as an open and powerful "notepad"; for myself, you can record other people's good ideas, and you are suddenly Feelings and thoughts, one or two sentences are not worth blogging, twitter is suitable; can be consulted, can be shared.

Oriented reading. This demand is particularly important in the early development of twitter, even pushing twitter to complete the accumulation of large-scale users, and turning twitter from a tool that reports "what are you doing" into a reading platform for information. Well-known blog media such as techcrunchventurebeat, CNNNYT and other big media have opened accounts to push the latest news. The only thing you need to do is to tap the mouse and follow it! Waiting to see the latest news will do.

Pay attention to one person. This includes two meanings, one is to pay attention to the people you know, you want to know his dynamic news; the other is to pay attention to the people you pay attention to, such as celebrities, the founder of techcrunch, Arlington, can see him at any time. What to say, what to think about, very interesting, and valuable. You can also pay attention to Obama. But they don't know you at all.

Timely news acquisition. In addition to subscribing to the media's twitter account to get instant push news, timely news from users' self-published is an important factor in Twitter's media value. The most popular speculations are "Mumbai terrorist attacks" and "American planes forced to land on the river." As far as the domestic market is concerned, similar to the CCTV fire, I estimate that no one is better than walking on the roadside. It is faster to "tweet", and Twitter has smoothed the threshold for private press release! In addition to this kind of timely news, the various news that you share is also of high value. For example, I have received a lot of news on twitter many times.

Share (recommended) information flow. The most basic sharing is to record your feelings, your point of view, follow your people can quickly see and decide whether RT or reply. Systematic point sharing is that you can aggregate your blog, your google reader share, and so on into your twitter account to form a complete personal information stream. The corporate twitter account is also the idea.

broadcast. In essence, twitter is a kind of broadcast message. However, the existence of RT (Retweet, sharp push) and other methods make this broadcast effect to the extreme, through the continuous RT of multi-level follow users, often let a message achieve multi-level amplification. Another feature of broadcasting is that the last time I investigated on Twitter about the normal access of Google in the past, I got 72 answers from more than a dozen provinces in 5 minutes.

communication. This is not much explained. You can publicly reply to a point of view, or you can send a private Direct Messages message. Most importantly, when more people are already on Twitter, sometimes you will find that finding someone on twitter is faster than email and more effective than IM. Twitter is a business card!

Identify your Twitter goals

Before you rush into Twitter, you should be clear about your Twitter goals.

Why do you need to use Twitter?

For personal social interaction (just communicate with friends or family).

For business networking (building a commercial community with your users, businesses or business partners).

To keep in touch with your peers or to follow your competitors.

In order to get potential customers.

In order to bring traffic to your website or blog.

If you are a newcomer to Twitter and social media, this may require you to spend some time developing your Twitter goals. When you start getting involved, explore the content that Twitter presents to you and try to think about what you find.

Why is there a problem with your goal?

Your Twitter goal directly affects what you do on Twitter, and it also determines your account settings and the people you want to follow. When you use Twitter for a while, you will have a better understanding of what might happen, which may change your Twitter goals.

Someone Follow me

Everyone has their own judgment to decide who to follow. When someone you don't know follows you, you need to make a choice, and you want to follow him back or not.

Some people will always follow back.

Some people don't always do this.

These two decisions are wrong or correct, which is directly linked to your Twitter goal.

Some people don't always follow back because they don't have enough time to read every Tweets of Followers.

And those who always follow back, they usually read Tweets in their timeline.

Before you make your Follow strategy, please think back to your Twitter goal.

Tip: Give your Follow advice, you may be able to cope when you are around 100 people, but when you follow 500 people, you may not be able to.

Your Twitter community

Twitter divides your community into two basic groups:

The person of you Follow (blue)

Follow your people (green)

However, a more useful statement is that your Twitter community should be three groups:

The person of your follow returns to you at the same time, that is to say you are two-way follow, this should be considered a discussion area of your personal community.

Follow your people but you don't follow them.

You follow people but they don't follow you.

How do I post a Tweets message?

There are three types of Tweets messages you can send here.

Ordinary Tweets Message: This is an open Tweet that can be posted to follow everyone on you.

@Replies: An open Tweet message that is posted to a given user. You can send a @reply response to someone who sends a message to you, or you can send @reply (reply) to Any user on Twitter. (Usually when the reply message is posted, the @ symbol follows the other party's Twitter ID, such as if you want to reply to me, then the format is "@riku message content")

Direct message. This is a private message sent to follow you. If someone doesn't follow you, you can't send such a message. (In Twitter, send such messages via the d command, for example, if you want to send a private message to me, the format is "d riku message content").

Here are some suggestions for you to post what kind of Tweet messages:

What are you doing (but not boring).

The business problem you are facing now.

The content you are reading or the web page you are watching may be read by others (if it is interesting).

The notice posted a new blog post, press release, new product or promotion opportunity, and more.

Share words with deep insights or humor.

Ask questions, your friends may be able to help you solve problems through their own experience.

Conversational skills

On Twitter, you have to listen and talk, see what people are talking about, and get into the conversation. Read to know who you follow and respond to their Tweet messages. If they suggest you read something, try it.

If you just talk about your own business or sell your business, it is estimated that no one will watch your Tweet message. Of course, you can actually do these things, but the problem is that you need to find a balance. Twitter focuses on conversations and conversations, and no one likes to talk about yourself and not listen to others.

Personality and transparency

Your community members expect a natural person, not a company. With your corporate Twitter account, you need to find a balance between reaching your Twitter business goals and showing your personality.

Similarly, in your communication, your community members expect you to be true and honest, in a fashionable way, this is called transparency. This means that you can't make fake news for your own benefit. You have the courage to admit your own faults and shortcomings. This kind of rest can bring about changes in your traditional public relations and marketing relationships, and of course it may be slow, but it will ensure that you continue to stay on the original goal.

Establish a session

In any case, you don't have to be busy with a reply to make a conversation. When you want to make sure to talk to someone in a reply, you can change the way you talk and use private messages. In this way, your message will not be displayed in the Timeline. Otherwise, maybe you think you are enjoying the conversation, but for others it may be a noise. When you are very comfortable with someone on Twitter, you may switch to using email or other communication tools to continue communicating.

keep active

You should perform the following three operations to maintain your community and achieve your Twitter goals. They are all very important, but the time it takes to perform each type of operation is quite different.

communicate with

Sending and reading Tweet messages is the most activity you have on Twitter, and you use the most direct purpose of Twitter to talk to your community members.

Community management

In the beginning, it will take some time to clarify your Twitter community and Follow strategy to get close to your Twitter goals. But when you have a basic grasp of these, you can manage your community in just a few minutes a week.

Reputation management

Here you can hear some people talking about you and your company, products and brands via Twitter. There are many ways to find these more concealed conversations. When you are familiar with these methods or tools and can work well for you, then you only need to spend a small amount of time each week to complete the task.