This post was originally written for my blog kevindowling.ie. Original post here: Click!. Subscribe

Simple question to rule social media!

It’s only within the last six to nine months that Twitter has become so massive. I even wrote about the hordes of social media gurus popping up on the service, offering advice and services to business customers.

Twitter has a huge pool of users, spread out throughout the internet via the website itself, other web applications and desktop/mobile applications.

At first it can be daunting. I’ve been using it for about a year now (one account is now defunct since I started using @kev_d), and in that time picked up a lot of neat tips and tricks that anyone can pick up easily, if they know where to look. Instead of making it a daunting experience, I’m going to list a few key features you should know!

First off, as the image at the top of the post suggests, twitter only asks one simple question that you answer time and time again - what are you doing? This shows exactly what the service is about in one phrase. The whole point of twitter is to be a micro-blogging site/service. The community aspect arrived after, driven by the community itself.

Interacting with the community is easy. All you need to do is “Follow” a person to get everything they update into your “timeline” (the list of tweets being pushed to your account from the people you follow!). They can “Follow” you back, but they don’t have to. It can be a one-way communication tool, unlike friends on services like bebo or facebook. For example, you might follow a news service to get updates on local news events, but they might not follow you back!

Unfortunately your follower/following ratio is usually the basis on which people judge how good/useful an account is, so a huge amount of dodgy services have arisen that will “automatically” grant you 1000 followers. This is not in the spirit of the service, and becomes useless to you if you’re trying to build a community/network of friends, colleagues and collaborators through the service. People know a shill when they see one!

You can send public messages to people on twitter easily. All you do is type their username with an @ sign in front of it. So a message to me might be written in the format:

@kev_d You smell!

This means I’ll get a special message in my timeline saying someone’s mentioned me in a tweet (a tweet is one message sent on twitter). However, everyone following me and you will also see it. So twitter has “DM”s (direct messages) which follow the format:

d @kev_d You Smell!

Incidentally, a recent discovery was made whereby adding another character (people are using “.”) in front of the message will broadcast it to everyone, regardless if they’re following us!

#followfriday shows a huge amount of interest all the time!

However, don’t get scared. Twitters website and most applications have buttons and user-interface design stuff to handle all that so you just have to hit a “reply” or “direct message” button to make the magic happen.

So, once you have friends and stuff, what can you do? Well, you can contribute to group discussions or events that are communally set up (i.e. people make them up, rather then twitter dictating them) using “hashtags”. These follow the format #event, and most clients will convert that to a link to the debate. The most popular ones that always arise are #musicmonday - which is where people share an artist, song or album that they enjoy on Monday and #followfriday (or #ff) which is where you recommend friends to others that are worth following, which is a great way to find new people to connect to.

The applications I use outside of twitter, using my twitter account

Once you get used to the idea of twitter, it’s a good idea to use a new application. Why? Well, from my own experience, it’s easier to manage a twitter account externally, not only because it’s nicer, but also because a lot of external applications implement ideas that aren’t even on twitter yet! For example, a new feature on twitter is “lists”, which group together followers into categories (”Bayern Munich Fans”, or “Photographers”, for example). This feature was introduced early on with Brizzly, but they called it “groups”. Hell, even @reply wasn’t part of twitter initially!

I would recommend Tweetie for Apple Mac OS X and iPhone, or on Windows TweetDeck. If you want a web-based interface you can’t go wrong with Brizzly!

A more advanced feature is letting external applications use your twitter account. Just like Facebook, you can extend the use of your Twitter account by granting other services access to your details. Some are dodgy, like games akin to “mafia wars” or “IQ test” which send everyone you follow a DM from you, spamming their accounts, but others are nicer, like Tweety for Google Wave or Brizzly which let you tweet from other applications on the web! You can see all the apps you have connected to your account (and remove them, if needed) at /connections.

Another thing I want to mention is trending topics. Like #hashtags, any other phrase is logged by Twitter. People can discuss all kinds of things, without using formal conventions like #hashtags. It’s not as easy to do, but you can allow people to discuss a topic just by mentioning the same words over and over again. The more popular it is (i.e. the more people discussing it) the more likely it is to become a trend. Thus twitter introduced trending topics, a list of the top 10 or so topics being discussed. It’s worth watching these as it’s in there that you’ll find breaking news (like Michael Jacksons death) before the news itself finds it!

Other then that my only real advice is to have fun, and chat with me by following @kev_d