Twitter for n00bs: Hunting the Goods
Welcome to the fourth installment of my Twitter for N00bs series. You can find the intro post here.
My fourth blog of the series is balancing out my previous on giving to the Twitter community, now I’m making a list of useful resources you can use to find interesting stuff on the network. Afterall, there’s no point in tweeting if you’re not getting anything out of it!
- Search the Twittersphere! – Just check out what people are saying on Twitter. This is helpful for keeping track of conversations, events, people… anything! I was showing my father over my holidays how to look up industry activities on Twitter. He still hasn’t a Twitter account, but my mum was interested in how to look up “gardening tips” for sure!
- Hashtags – Mentioned in my last blog, these things are so useful! A bit tricky to get a grasp on at first, you’ll be using them in many, many tweets from now on. To quote from a recent reader, “If people are looking for tweets about the TV show ‘Lost’, they probably aren’t interested in someone talking about their lost cat (though they possibly should be). So people use #LOST to show the tweet is specifically about the show.” Excellent way of putting it!
- Twitter User Groups – A little self-promotion here, but I cannot stress enough the helpfulness of your local community. Find them, follow a few and ask away! Using the hashtag for your city (e.g. #Brisbane) is a good way of finding local information too. Another way to find local tweeps is by visiting Nearby Tweets. (thanks @jendudley for the reminder!)
- Wefollow – A category-based user directory. Put yourself up there by nominating three categories and ye shall be sought!
- Twellow – This one I feel is a bit outdated, but it’s still a good one for finding tweeps with common interests.
Bonus cleaning mentions
These are the two sites I tell tweeps about when they’re complaining of issues managing followers.
- FriendorFollow – Just as the name says, this one lists who is following you, who you’re following and who is a mutual friend. I use it when I’m jack of following uninteresting people
- Twitoria – Best. Ever. This one shows who the slack tweeps are you’re following. Someone hasn’t tweeted for a few months? Few weeks? Easy clean-up!
Well, I hope I’ve delivered on easy-to-use resources for finding interesting things on Twitter. And just for the marketing gurus who are looking for something a little specified: How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR
(So, Paul… still think we’re lonely? Stupid?)
May 19th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
[...] This post was Twitted by Smiles57 – Real-url.org [...]
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:11 pm
A tip for using hashtags: put them at the beginning of your tweet. By doing that you can quickly see how many characters you have left for your tweet. It also means you won’t accidentally delete while editing your tweet down to 140 characters. (Learned this the hard way.)
Bill.