Twitter 101, Episode 3: You Don't Know Hash!

It's Friday, and I'll be taking my blog back soon.  Today is the last guest post by Mr. Attack Resistance, in which he finally gets to the point and tells you how to use Twitter, and more importantly, that you should follow me.  And I guess him, too.  You should also check out his blog, conveniently called Attack Resistance, and leave harassing comments until he posts more often, thus demonstrating that not everything worthwhile can be said in 140 characters or less.




So begins my third, and final, installment on why you should
love Twitter. I’d like to thank my gracious
host for allowing me to ramble on for the last three days and, of course,
you Dear Readers
for coming along with me on this tangent filled journey. If you are, somehow,
just now joining us you can find part one here,
and part two, here
(anyone else get weirded out by referring to an HTML link as a physical
place?).






By now, you should understand how humanity evolved from
loving shadow puppets to loving truncated communication forms and you should
also be aware of that you can use Twitter to survive an earthquake [AUTHOR’S
NOTE: Don’t use Twitter for any form of emergency response]. What you don’t
know, yet, is how to actually use Twitter. That’s what we’re going to address
today. Let’s get started.




Like any other social media website, you’ll need to setup a
profile by selecting a user name, password, and providing a few details. Your
Twitter handle can be anything you want it to be, provided it isn’t already being
used and doesn’t violate the Terms of Service you said you read but didn’t.
Your user name will be proceeded by the @ symbol, so if your user name is, say,
AttackResist, it would appear thusly: @AttackResist
When someone types your @ in a Tweet they have ‘mentioned’ you (just like
tagging someone in a Facebook post). A common way for people to tag another
user within a tweet is to add a ‘cc:’ to the tweet. For instance:




I read recently that sociologists
drink more beer than any other profession. cc: @think_too_much




It’s important to note that this is publicly viewable.
Anything you say in this manner will be seen by anyone who is following you or
anyone who is weird
enough to search Twitter for ‘sociologists drink more beer’. 




Now, if you’re
having a conversation with a common theme or if you’d just like to mark your
tweet in a unique way you would use a hashtag. Hashtags are in vogue at the
moment and were developed by the users of Twitter independent of any of the
programmers.A real world example of the proper use of the hashtag follows:




I read recently that sociologists
drink more beer than any other profession. #ThingsRobynAlreadyKnows cc:
@think_too_much




Inside Twitter, hashtags can be clicked and this will bring
up a list of all tweets containing the same tag. This can be exceptionally
useful if you want to keep track of a particular hashtag. Twitter will display
to you the most popular hashtags by country, region, or locality at your
discretion allowing you easy access to the conversations going on around you.
Hashtags won’t recognize any punctuation marks so give up any hope of being
grammatically correct when using one. While not required, I suggest
capitalizing each new word in a tag to allow for easier reading. 




At some point
you’ve probably seen a hashtag on Facebook and asked yourself, “What the hell
does that mean?” Well, now you know. And you also know that the person using
the hashtag is infinitely cooler than you. Get your stuff together. You disgust
me.




Again, everything you tweet is viewable and searchable by
the public at large. EXCEPT! Except for Direct Messages. Direct messages are
tweets between two (and only two) users. All the same rules apply here. 140
characters, hashtags, etc. the only difference is that visibility is limited to
you and your recipient. Use Direct Messages when you want to say something you
don’t want everyone else to see. Let me say that one more time: Use Direct
Messages when you want to say something you don’t want everyone else to see.




Another key feature of Twitter is the retweet. Retweets are
used to quickly and easily share a tweet you’ve found interesting. They can
exist in a few different formats:



.         RT – You will encounter tweets from time to time
that start with the letters RT. This is a more manual way of retweeting something.
You copy the text of the tweet, start a new tweet by writing RT – and then
pasting.
.      
MT – This stands for modified tweet. These occur
when someone takes a tweet, alters it in an appreciable way, and rebroadcasts
it.
.      
H/T – This stands for Hat Tip. Usually used when
you take just part of a tweet (a link or a picture, typically) and build your
own message around it.
.      
Just hit the damn Retweet button.












Use retweets judiciously. Like it or not, they can imply
endorsement or support.




Okay, almost done. We’ve covered character limits (140),
mentions (@attackresist), Direct Messages (quit snooping, jerk!) hashtags (#PayAttention),
Retweets (Retweets). Now let’s talk about one more thing: Link shortening.




Twitter will most often do this for you, simply by pasting a
link, but there are other ways. The most popular of which is bit.ly. I use this with some frequency, and you
should too. Because I said so. Using link shorteners allows excessively long
links to fit in an otherwise lengthy tweet. For instance, the following tweet
exceeds the 140 character limit:




@AttackResist doesn’t update often
but his blog is awesome and you should read it whenever he does. http://www.attackresistance.blogspot.com





However, with a link shortener that same tweet fits the
limit:




@AttackResist doesn’t update very
often, but his blog is awesome and you should definitely read it whenever he
does. http://bit.ly/eZ3sjJ




There you have it, kids: The bare minimum needed to get
started using Twitter. I strongly suggest that you immediately follow @think_too_much. You’re already a
fan, else why would you be reading this? Thanks mom, but you
don’t count. You should also follow me,
because I am amazing. Once you’re up and running, give me a shout. I’ll hold
your hand while you get better acquainted with the most useful communication
tool since the shadow puppet.




This is Mr. Attack Resistance, signing off.