Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [11]
You can get much more value from Twitter — and have a lot more fun — if you just let yourself relax and talk about what’s on your mind. Passionate about aardvarks? Send out a few tweets with aardvark facts and see who talks back to you. Have a burning desire to change careers from accounting to roadie for a rock band? Talk about it! You can probably get a response or two.
How Twitter differs from Facebook
“Facebook is closed, Twitter is open. Facebook is structured, Twitter is scattered. Facebook is people you’ve known, and many you might have wanted to forget; Twitter is people you never knew, but might have wanted to meet. And because of all of that, barring an acquisition or failure to execute . . . Twitter will overtake Facebook and become the backbone of the real-time web.”
— Brightidea.com CEO Matthew Greeley (@brightidea)
If you’re a regular Facebook user, you may be wondering how Twitter is any different from the status updates that are part of Facebook. The main way in which Twitter differs from Facebook is that with Facebook, you’re broadcasting your status updates to people you’ve allowed to be your friend and view your profile on Facebook. On Twitter, you’re by default sharing your updates with the world. You can protect your Twitter updates so that only people you allow can see them, but that’s not very common. Instead, most people leave their tweets open to the public, which means anyone who’s interested in what you’re saying can follow you — and you can choose to follow them back or just ignore them. You don’t have to know the people you follow, and your followers don’t have to know you.
Replies work much differently on Facebook, and as a result, the system is much less dynamic. On Facebook when people reply to your status update, their replies appear with your update itself, which moves farther and farther down in the feed, until eventually it’s not even seen anymore. On Twitter, the most recent replies are always at the top of the stream, which means the conversation continues to be relevant and visited for as long as people are talking.
On Twitter, people frequently repeat your tweets for their own followers. It’s commonly called retweeting. If your band is playing at a club on Friday, you might tweet, “MyBand rocks out Blondie’s, 123 Main St, LA, Fri 9/3 @ 9 pm www.myband.com for tickets” If any of your followers want to spread the word, they might tweet, “RT @yourname: MyBand rocks out Blondie’s, 123 Main St, LA, Fri 9/3 @ 9 pm www.myband.com for tickets” That RT is shorthand for retweet, and by putting your name after RT, they’re letting their followers know you’re the one who originally posted it (and that you’re the one whose band is playing at Blondie’s). If you want to encourage people to retweet something, you can even put something like, “Please RT” in the tweet. What all this means is that your tweets can spread like wildfire, and you can get the word out (fast!) about the things you want to share.
It’s really striking to see how much faster, more easily, and farther messages spread on Twitter. Sharing and passing along information is what makes Twitter a sensitive global news detector, a powerful tool for social change or marketing, and an interesting and dynamic flow of ideas and information.
Tweeting Like a Pro
We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!
— Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, accepting Twitter’s Web Award honor at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March 2007
Simply put, a tweet is what you call the 140-character message that you send out onto the Web by using Twitter.
Why call it a tweet? It’s convenient, tying into the whole theme of birds chirping. Also, like much of the Twitter vocabulary, tweet is a term coined by the users, rather than the company — evidence of the playful loyalty that avid users have with the Twitter brand.
Twitter limits the length of tweets to 140 characters (letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces),