Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [36]
How to Follow People
Mechanically, following people on Twitter is dead simple. After you navigate to a person’s Profile page, click the Follow button just below his avatar. And, you’re done! Give it a shot:
1. Browse to http://twitter.com/dummies.
2. Click the Follow button.
The button changes to the word Following. Cool!
Alternately, you can post this message from SMS or any Twitter interface by typing Follow username or F username.
Following people on Twitter is straightforward. On the most superficial level, you just have to pay attention. Twitter is full of thousands of great conversations going on all around you. If you open yourself up to them, you may find that hundreds of excellent people are thrilled to meet you.
Replying to Tweets
So, what happens when you receive an @reply, and you want to respond — or if you just want to respond to any tweet, for that matter? Hover your mouse cursor over the right side of the tweet in question when you see it in your stream on Twitter’s Home screen, and images of an arrow and a star appear (as shown in Figure 5-5).
Clicking the Star icon bookmarks that tweet as a favorite — which we cover in Chapter 3. But clicking the Arrow icon sets up the Twitter entry field so that you can reply to that individual tweet. When you send your response, it says In Reply To below the tweet and includes a live link to the standalone page (also known as a permalink) for the tweet you responded to. Figure 5-6 shows a typical Twitter @reply.
Figure 5-5: Don’t miss the Reply arrow!
Figure 5-6: You can respond to tweets by using @replies.
You may find these permalinks helpful because Twitter is not great at threading tweets together by conversation. If you’re familiar with a set of @replies and the links associated with them, you can much more easily navigate the conversation later. When you know how to access the individual page for each tweet, you can also link to that tweet directly if you choose to respond to it in a longer format outside of Twitter, such as a blog post.
You can reply to any tweet that you can see, and the procedure is the same, whether you’re following the person or not. But, assuming your Twitter account is public, your @replies are public, too. If you want to use Twitter for private messages, the protocol is a little different, as we talk about in the section “Direct Messaging,” later in this chapter.
Go ahead and jump right in
Given the casual and conversational tone of Twitter, you can pretty easily jump into an existing conversation on Twitter, and (unless you’re trying) you don’t look like you’re barging in. Twitter users are aware that this is a public forum and contributions can come from anywhere and at anytime. Start by clicking one of the usernames involved in the conversation, or enter one or both usernames manually in the Update window. (Remember: The format for addressing a Twitter user is @username.) Then chime in by saying something relevant to their discussion.
Don’t rush to be conversational to the point that you end up being irrelevant. If the conversation is about something you don’t know anything about, hold off. But if it’s about a movie that you’ve seen or a business theory that you’ve put into practice, pipe up!
It may take a few tries with a few different people to get the ball rolling. Don’t be discouraged if you send out a few @replies and don’t get responses; some Twitter users, especially relatively new