The Language of Twitter What Is Twitter? Twitter is a “microblog.” It allows you to say something and send it out to the world…but it only gives you 140 characters to do it in. Your post can contain pictures, videos, or links to additional content on other sites. You can re-send others’ posts to your own followers, and reply to them. Twitter excels at “breaking news.” Twitter is all about what’s happening right now, and is the go-to source for news and disasters. News organizations monitor Twitter closely, and it is often the first place they release information. Unlike Facebook, anyone anywhere can see your tweets whether they follow you or not. Twitter Terminology @ Reply: (pronounced: “at reply”) You will often see the symbol @ on Twitter followed by someone’s screen name. It’s a way to hold a public conversation with that person. “@kerryshearer Thanks for the great workshop” DM: DM means Direct Message. When you DM a Twitter user, you can hold a private conversation with them, but you can only DM people who are already following you. (Be careful with this!) RT: RT means Retweet. If you want to share something someone says on Twitter, you can hit the retweet button to spread the message to your followers as well. And you can thank others: “@BobSmith125 Thanks for the RT” Hashtag (#): A hashtag is simply a filing system for tweets to help you find the content you’re looking for. When you see the pound symbol (#) ahead of a word or phrase, it is essentially a keyword tag for the tweet so that others can find it. It allows you to follow the stream of everyone talking about a specific subject. Hashtags can be serious, such as #LAearthquake or #Tsunami, and they can be funny (like #ImSoDarnTired). One or two hashtags per tweet is a good rule of thumb. Twitter Chat: A Twitter chat happens when several people get on Twitter at once to share ideas with one another. They do this by using a specific hashtag. For example, every Sunday, bloggers across the country participate in #blogchat, following the conversation and sharing ideas with that tag. Lists: When the list of people you follow on Twitter grows big, you can sort them into specific lists to keep them more organized. Lists can be public or private. 1 Favorite: If you want to save a Tweet for later, you can hit the “Favorite” button. Favoriting a tweet can be misunderstood: it can, but doesn’t necessarily, mean that the person who tags your tweet likes what you’re saying. They may just be saving it to follow up on later. HanDy Twitter Applications Social Media Management Tools Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and Tweetbot are favorite apps and programs for monitoring and responding to your social media posts in one convenient interface on your desktop, laptop, or mobile device. Scheduling Tools Buffer (Bufferapp.com) is a convenient post scheduling tool that allows you to “fill the hopper” with everygreen content, which it then releases every day at one or more times of your choosing. The advantage to this is that you can fill up your buffer with several days worth of posts, which automatically go out on the schedule you choose. It runs until the buffer is empty. Buffer can also be installed as a browser extension, which means that when you come across an article, such as a blog post, on the Internet that you want to share, you just hit a button in your browser bar and it creates a tweet that you can then edit as desired and schedule for release. Later Bro (LaterBro.com) is another post scheduling tool that lets you write and schedule posts at specific times. 2 .