Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [17]
Inviting Contacts
During the registration process, after you import your contacts from your e-mail address book, you have the option to invite any of your contacts who aren’t yet using Twitter.
The process is really simple:
1. On the Why Not Invite Some Friends? screen (see Figure 2-5), select which of your contacts you’d like to invite to join Twitter.
Figure 2-5: Ask your friends to join the party!
2. Click the green Invite arrow.
An invitation to join Twitter will be sent to the people you selected, letting them know that you’re on Twitter and they can follow your updates by signing up for Twitter themselves.
If you’ve used the Find on Other Networks tool, you’ve already been prompted to invite friends from your address book who aren’t on Twitter. If you want to invite your friends by hand, without having Twitter go through your address book, take the following steps:
1. On the top navigation bar of any Twitter page, click the Find People link.
The tabbed navigation loads below the navigation bar.
2. Click Invite by Email.
A text box appears.
3. Enter the e-mail addresses of the people to whom you want to send an invite.
Separate each e-mail address with a comma and a space.
4. After you enter all the addresses you want, click Invite.
You’re done!
If you choose not to do this now, you can always go back and do it later. Simply click Find People in the toolbar at the top of your Twitter profile to make the input screen for e-mail invitations appear.
If you don’t opt to invite people during the registration process, or you want to invite people down the road, you can always e-mail people you know whom you think would most enjoy or benefit from Twitter, sending them a link to your Twitter profile and writing a note explaining what Twitter is. Many people choose this approach when they first join Twitter so that they can keep the invitation process personal.
Many Twitter users, co-author @geechee_girl included, have put Twitter handles on business cards and in e-mail signature lines. These actions are indirect invitations for the people who meet us in real life or interact with us in business to connect with us on Twitter, as well. The more people who join you on Twitter, the more effective your network becomes.
Say Hello! Your First Tweets
The entire premise of Twitter is to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less. So, go ahead! Tell Twitter what you’re doing right now. Type a message in the What Are You Doing? text box, keeping under the 140-character limit. When you’re done, click Update. Congratulations! You’ve just made your first tweet.
If you’re thinking, “Wait, that’s it?” you’re right: That’s it. Tweeting is that simple, but that simplicity makes it powerful. Your first tweet was probably something mundane, such as, “Trying out this Twitter thing” or “Hello there, Twitter. I’m reading Twitter For Dummies!”
But while you start to add more and more updates, people begin to see what’s going on in your life and what you’re thinking about. Twitterers following you or searching for keywords in Twitter, in all likelihood, start talking to you about what you’re doing. The conversation starts with those simple exchanges: Talk about your favorite band’s new album, your mechanic and how she fixed your car’s catalytic converter, or really anything at all. If you’ve already found your contacts on Twitter, they probably respond to you pretty quickly. If you don’t have any followers yet, don’t worry; they’ll come.
We discuss suggested Twitter etiquette, culture, language, and all that stuff in Chapter 7. This chapter simply tells you how to get your Twitter profile up and running so that it reflects who you are and what you want to get out of Twitter.
Your tweets, right now, are publicly visible and searchable, even if you delete them immediately after hitting Update. This situation isn’t life or death, but be careful. If your updates are