Twitter for Dummies (14 page)

Part II

Joining Your Flock on Twitter

In This Part . . .

After you set up a Twitter account and know how to find everything Twitter-related that you might need, you probably want to know and find the people you want to communicate with.

In this part, we show you how to find the people you may know outside of Twitter on Twitter, locate people who share your interests, and identify other personalities and brands that you may want to connect with using Twitter.

Chapter 5

Tweeting It Up

In This Chapter

Following people

Scouring Twitter for interesting people to follow

Replying to messages, privately and publicly

Attracting new followers

One of the neatest things about the Twitter experience is that your conversations, your followers, and your ability to interact with them extends far past the Twitter.com interface into other platforms and even into the real world due to the Twitter community’s tendency to plan both formal and spontaneous events. But equally important to accessing your Twitter account from virtually anywhere is understanding how to interact within the community.

In this chapter, we go over the nuts and bolts involved in discovering, managing, and interacting with the people you follow on Twitter and the people who follow you. Additionally, we give you some hints about how to play well with others within the twitterverse so that you can start having conversations right away!

Finding People to Follow on Twitter

A key part of getting the most out of Twitter is knowing where and how to find people whose Twitter streams are of interest to you.

You can pretty easily find people to follow on Twitter: You naturally browse to people’s profiles when you think that something they say is interesting or relevant to you. But, when you start accumulating updates from the people you follow, you’ll quickly realize that you need to figure out who’s worth following. That process can become complicated because of the large size and diversity of the Twitter ecosystem.

Avid users have countless theories and strategies about the best ways and reasons to follow others. That’s the beauty of Twitter: You can make it up as you go along and create your own criteria for building up a Twitter stream.

Twitter is a very personalized experience. No two people use Twitter in exactly the same way, and no two people follow a given account on Twitter for exactly the same reasons. Quite literally, no two people experience the same Twitter because everyone is consuming different streams, and publishing to, and interacting with different sets of readers.

Twitter is not a single village, as the term
Twitterville
implies. When Laura wrote “Twitter is my Village,” (
http://pistachioconsulting.com/it-takes-a-village-to-understand-twitter
), she meant that each twitterer’s personal community on Twitter functions like a village. Even if Twitter goes heavily mainstream, you’ll still be able to shape your experience there by selecting who you listen to and interact with.

While you become better at your entire Twitter experience, you’re continually developing and changing your own guidelines for building your following and follower bases. Luckily, Twitter is built to allow for these changes, so you don’t have to miss a beat.

Whether you’re looking for business associates, news sources, friendly conversation, or anything else, Twitter can help you surround yourself with people and companies that can enrich your stream.

Look who’s talking

When you want to start looking for people to follow, see whether anyone’s already talked back to you. If you’ve already posted some tweets, people may have replied to you. (If you haven’t yet tweeted, what are you waiting for? Dive in and start tweeting!)

When someone wants to address you directly on Twitter, that user does so by replying to you. They simply put the @ symbol before your Twitter handle at the beginning of a tweet — that’s all it takes to reply. If you’re following that person, the tweet shows up in your Twitter stream. If you’re not following that person, you can still see any tweets that mention you on the Mentions tab in the sidebar (it’s the tab with @ followed by your username on it).

If you’re completely new to Twitter and you’ve only posted a handful of tweets, you probably won’t have any mentions yet. That’s okay! You have plenty of other options for finding people to follow (see the next sections).

Searching for people

You can best search for people on Twitter by using one of two methods: Twitter Search (
http://search.twitter.com
) or the People Search function (
http://twitter.com/search/users
). You can also reach Twitter’s People Search page (as shown in Figure 5-1) by clicking Find People in the upper-right corner of your Twitter screen’s toolbar.

Another, lesser-known way to find people on Twitter is by simply using the Google search engine at
www.google.com
. Because Google indexes every public tweet, you can use it to find twitterers by interest or by name. To use Google to find twitterers that you might want to follow, either search their firstname lastname and the word Twitter or do a slightly more specific search this way:

1. Type your keywords or the username you’re looking for in the text box.

2. Add
site:Twitter.com
at the end of your search query.

3. Click the Search button.

See what pops up! Figure 5-2 shows the results of a search for Lance Armstrong.

You probably want to conduct people searches and keyword searches periodically to make sure that you continue to cultivate your Twitter experience’s richness and value with new voices. Although Twitter is great for reconnecting with old friends and keeping up a conversation with existing business associates, it’s also a fantastic way to reach out and find new people and companies to listen to.

A great way to get started following people on Twitter is to import your contacts from your Web-based e-mail account (like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail). We cover this in detail in Chapter 2.

Inviting people personally, through Twitter

Another option for inviting people to Twitter is to do it personally, directly to their individual e-mail addresses. You can find this tab (Invite By Email) on the Find People page (as shown in Figure 5-3), and it gives you a way to hand-pick people from your e-mail address book. You can also text Twitter at 40404 at anytime with the words
invite [email protected]
substituting in your friend’s e-mail address, of course.

Keep in mind that Twitter doesn’t offer you a chance to customize what the e-mail says. The person or company you invite gets a generic e-mail that mentions your Twitter handle and some basic information about how to sign up for an account. If you have people you want to invite to Twitter whom you think may not respond well to a generic e-mail, you can use the method described in the following section to invite them, instead.

Figure 5-3:
The Twitter Invite By Email screen.

The main drawback to any of the invitation options in Twitter’s Web interface is that none of them offer a custom message option. If you know people whom you want to invite, and you think they’d respond better to a private or more personalized note, just shoot them a normal e-mail that includes a link to the Twitter main page (
www.twitter.com
) and a note about why they might benefit from signing up and joining in. It’s often more effective to e-mail them a link to an article that is going to help them understand what uses of Twitter they may find valuable. Twitter is definitely a minute-to-learn, lifetime-to-master type of system.