Getting Twitter connected

Twitter is a fast-paced social media tool. It is unlike Facebook or LinkedIn where the goal is to mimic full real life relationships. Twitter's goal is to allow quick interactions among users. Quick, however, doesn't mean disengaged. Below are some areas to consider when working with Twitter.

Character limit

Whatever you want to say must be said in a small, 140-character limit. There are several ways this will impact how you write your post.

First, you need to be willing to use abbreviations. In Twitter it is perfectly OK to use "u" instead of "you." There are other abbreviations I see only on Twitter, such as POTUS meaning President of the United States.

Secondly, use a url shortener such as bit.ly or Tiny URL. What these services do is take a link such ashttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/ 03/17/nyregion/17budget.html?hp and make it shorter such as http:// nyti.ms/akrqzv.

Go ahead and check, those two links go to the same place, but the second one uses significantly fewer characters.

Finally, an issue many people do not think about is the effect of the length of their own Twitter name. For example, Bill Gates' Twitter name is "BillGates" so that is eight characters long. If people want to re-tweet his post, they must use all of the characters from his original post plus give him credit with "RT @BillGates:" or use an additional 14 characters (spaces count). This means if his post is 130 characters long, it must be edited before it can be re-tweeted by another user.

Retweet

Retweeting is a great way to interact with other Twitter users. If you find a post interesting and want to share it with your followers, then you just copy the post and use the "RT @…" format. Just substitute the "…" for the user's name.

So if you liked something Bill Gates posted, such as "Today is an awesome day," then you could post "RT @BillGates: Today is an awesome day."

People really appreciate the credit and exposure you will give them. It also is a great way to show you are listening to what people have to say.

Have conversations

Twitter is not just for posting how you feel, you can actually engage individuals with ongoing conversation. There are two ways to do this.

A private way is to send a direct message (DM) to a person. The individual will be the only one who can read your DM. A public way is to refer to the individual in a post. If you wanted to talk to Karl Rove for example you would post "@karlrove How are you doing?" Karl Rove then could respond in the same way with "@yourusername Great, how about you?"

Use hashtags

A hashtag is a simple way of tagging posts. For example, you may see the hash tag "#tcot" a lot in conservative posts. #tcot is short for "top conservatives on Twitter." It is a great way for individuals to find conversations on Twitter that they want to be a part of.

If you want to participate in the discussion about health care reform, post about it and add "#hcr" to the end. Or, do a quick search for "#hcr."

Twitter is designed for quick snippets of content. Even so, you can build a relationship on Twitter with your followers. It does take some time, research and patience, but once you get connected on Twitter, you will find many individuals to engage.

Brian Boyer is the managing partner of Web Pyro (http:// www.webpyro.com) located in Wooster.