Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [46]
If you’re using Twitter for your business, or you plan to link to your products or posts on your personal blog, find a balance between the number of tweets that promote yourself and the number of tweets that provide value. You might think of this balance as an actual ratio. For example, for every link of your own that you place on Twitter, send out at least five tweets that inform, engage, and converse. If conversation and engagement are your aim, you definitely want to keep a human voice in your Twitter stream at all times.
It’s worth thinking about who you want to reach. People new to Twitter and only following a few get bowled over by frequent tweeters simply because it’s all they see on their stream. A roaring chat with friends you already know is a fine use of Twitter, too, and would involve many more tweets a day than, say, a business user or someone just figuring out what they want to do with the platform.
Inserting Links into Your Tweets
Virtually all Twitter users incorporate links into their tweets on a regular basis — by one estimate, 23 percent of tweets contain links. You can insert links to Web pages, blog entries, or even other tweets. The toughest part of including these links is getting them to fit in the 140-character limit while leaving yourself room to say something about why you’re sending the link out in the first place.
The URL shortener is a tool that was designed to manage exceptionally long URLs so that they would not “break” in e-mail and so that they’re easier to copy and paste. Twitter and services like it have heightened the need to save space when linking. Sites such as TinyURL.com (http://tinyurl.com), is.gd (http://is.gd), bit.ly (http://bit.ly), and budurl (http://budurl.com) automatically shorten a link into a shorter set of numbers and letters that forwards to the original link and can cut the link’s length down by as much as 70 or 80 percent. As of this writing, Twitter uses TinyURL.com by default on its Web site, so many of the links you post will be shortened for you but it’s done after the fact, so you don’t get to use the full 140 characters. Visit one of the other shortening sites for ways to shorten URLs in advance. Shorteners like bit.ly and budurl also track how your link did, showing you how many people clicked through or in some cases, retweeted your link, which is helpful for business and for seeing whether people like what you post.
Most important is to remember to include a short reason for the link (otherwise, your Twitter followers don’t know why they should click it), such as a headline or a hook that tells them why they might want to click. This is a real art. Some of the most popular tweeters have large followings because they’re good at this, and their stream is enjoyable to read. It’s also nice to give credit to a fellow tweeter by typing @username if you’re sharing someone else’s tweets or links. Typing @ followed by a Twitter username automatically links to that Twitter account Profile page so that you can see more about who that person is. It’s context.
If you want to link specifically to one specific tweet, rather than to a user’s account, first click the day and time at the end of the tweet itself to go to the permalink page for that tweet. You can then copy that link into a tweet of your own.
Using Your Twitter History and Favorites
If you want to access your Twitter history after you use the service for a while, you may find it a challenge, especially if you’re a frequent tweeter. But you can get your whole history from Twitter in a few ways:
TweetScan (www.tweetscan.com/data.php): A service that can pull Twitter history for any username. Unfortunately, TweetScan only goes back to December 2007, and if you’ve been on Twitter since it first hit the streets in 2006, you probably want to go back farther. Joined since then? You can get your entire Twitter history.
Twistory