This morning I came across the blog post “From Telegraph to Twitter: The Language of the Short Form“ by Roy Peter Clark, the author of the book ”Writing Tools” and producer of the hit podcast by the same name.

In his post, Clark writes about the impact Twitter has on language. As a late adopter, Clark just recently joined Twitter and in his article, he thoughtfully discusses the value Twitter offers to language, despite (or perhaps because of) its 140 character limit.

Clark’s main message is that

The brevity of an e-mail message, a blog post, a text message,
even a tweet, is no obstacle to powerful information,
a persuasive argument, a literary moment, a zinger, a joke.

This made me think of presentations and product demonstrations…and how they could benefit from this long known, but too often overlooked, understanding: less is often more.

]]> http://sennhauser.com/social-networking/learning-the-language-of-short-form-on-twitter/feed/ 0 http://sennhauser.com/social-networking/get-ready-to-tweet-tips-for-twitter-newbies/ http://sennhauser.com/social-networking/get-ready-to-tweet-tips-for-twitter-newbies/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 04:03:32 +0000 Claudio http://sennhauser.com/?p=60

So you finally decided to take the plunge and join Twitter. Congratulations! Twitter can be a very enriching destination in your personal digital universe. It allows you to connect with people you may not have found if it weren’t for Twitter. It lets you stay informed about the latest news and things you find interesting. And Twitter is so much more… 

Twitter is the RPG for non-gamers.
What are your stats?

Many people seem to take to Twitter wanting to expand their network quickly. Adding followers is the name of the game for many on Twitter. Tweeps (active Twitter users) love to show off their stats to their followers: “Only 18 more to 10,000″ and “Just passed 20K followers!” are an indicator of this gamer’s mindset of many Twitter participants. Runescape often comes to my mind when I see some of these stats reports.

Also look at all the programs out there that advertise to help you gain a huge number of followers. Not many moments pass by on Twitters global timeline without somebody spamming the system with “Like to have hundreds more followers every morning when youget up? Then click here: …” or “Get 19,530 new twitter followers in 30 days? Hey check this out…”. All of these, naturally, ending with a link to that one and only Twitter-Super-Quick-Follower-Base-System that tries to separate you from your hard earned money. Sure, some of these systems may work to put your twitter presence on auto-pilot, but what’s the point then being on Twitter? Making money? Okay. Perhaps… If it’s with yet another “Add Followers Quickly” scheme, please don’t add me to your Twitter followers. It’s just a bit too Escheresque to me…

The following tips that will grow your Twitter followers just as quickly as with one of these programs, but in a way that will be a personally satisfying experience, as you will connect to new, like-minded friends. 

Understand Twitter Conventions: @ and # Tags

Newcomers to Twitter may at first not understand why so many tweets contain the @ and # characters.

The @-sign marks a Twitter name and will turn it into a hyperlink to that Twitter profile. Whenever you are writing to or about someone on Twitter, precede their Twitter name with the @-sign.

Hashtags (#) are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. Like with anything, there are some people who really like the concept of hastags, other people dislike them with passion. For a good overview of how to use hashtags, please read An Introduction to Twitter Hashtags by Wild Apricot.

Don’t follow too many people initially

Twitter has some built-in functionality that limits how quickly one can grow a follower base. I’ve seen many people rush in and follow anybody and everybody that moved on Twitter, only to get stuck following 2,000 people with only a few hundred followers. That means they can’t follow back any new followers, which leads many of those new followers to un-follow after a few days to protect their own quota limits, resulting in much slower growth than they would like. To get out of this situation, they’ll have to comb through their list of people they are following and delete the inactive ones. This is time consuming and cumbersome, although websites like TwitterKarma can help greatly here. It lets you see at a glance who’s following or not following you and take bulk action. 

It’s better to start slow and grow your network organically, rather than with brute force. The quality of your followers will be much higher. A good place to find your first few dozen people to follow is Twitter’s own “Suggested Users” list. Another great site to comb the Twitterverse for new connections is Twitter Power Search. It lets users search the current Twitter stream for any keyword, or follow current trends. A recent favorite of mine is InRev’s TwitIn., as well as Twubble. These service recommend users who are likely to follow back.

Start out by following some of the real heavy weights. Look through the Twitter Recommendations and pick any of the people with several ten thousands of followers.  I recommend these people for several reasons. First, they are some of the Twitter Heavyweights. They have been around for a while and have ten thousands of followers. It’s helpful to tune into their stream of tweets to get a good overall feel for the place. Second, they will follow you back, and thus build your first base of followers, and third, they will bring you some of their followers as well. I remember when I signed up for Twitter (not too long ago), I picked some of Twitter’s Recommendations and the next time I checked my Twitter page, I was surprised how a dozen people I didn’t know could have found me.

Use the right tools

Twitter’s user interface is simple and clean. You see all the tweets by the people in your network as they were made over time. Recently, Twitter added “Search” and “Trending Topics” to your home page, making it easy to find other people with similar interests. So far so good. But when you start adding hundreds and even thousands of followers, Twitter’s simplicity becomes a bit of a inconvenience. It doesn’t allow you to create groups of your followers or sort the tweets on your timeline.

Luckily, there is the Twitter API that allows programmers to come up with new and innovative ways to work with the data in Twitter’s rapidly growing database. One of the most popular tools is TweetDeck. This is an application you download to your computer as a client to Twitter. By default, TweetDeck displays Twitter activity in three columns: All Friends, Replies, and Direct Messages. You can easily add groups, containing only the tweets of a select group of followers. I created one group called “Friends”, where only tweets by people I personally know show up. I also have a group called “Favorites”, where only tweets by people I find informative are being displayed. You can also add new columns containing only tweets you’ve setup a search logic. This allows you to quickly track those tweets in your network that contain keywords that are important to you. TweetDeck lets you post your tweets directly from your desktop (including shortening URLs and uploading pictures). It also allows you to easily reply to a post or re-tweet it and follow/un-follow other people.

Other tools to easily find out what your friends are doing and participate on Twitter include Seesmic Desktop, Twitteriffic (Mac), Tweetie (Mac and iPhone), and HootSuite (web-based). More tools can be found on Twitter’s Application Download page or at Mashable’s Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools. Try out some of these tools and leave a comment about your favorite way to participate in the twitterverse.

Twitter is NOT a “spectator sport”.
If u want more followers then u need to b PROACTIVE 2 get them.
@Jason_Pollock

Okay, you now have the right tools at your disposal and are starting to get familiar with the way Twitter works. Great! What next? How can you build your Twitter network to reach thousands of followers quickly?

Tweet with Purpose – Add Value to Your Network

Twitter prompts you to answer the question “What are you doing?” Although an answer like “Making Lasagna for dinner” may be interesting to some of your friends, it will bore a larger audience to the point of un-following you.

If you are on Twitter with the goal of expanding your network beyond your personal friends and family, then your tweets need to be informative and interesting. If you must tell the world about your Lasagna cooking, then I recommend you do it by uploading a photo to TwitPic or TweetPhoto. Those websites will automatically post a tweet about the photo when the upload is complete. Having a photo to go with your kitchen reporting goes a long way in making your tweet more interesting.

A good way to increase your signal-to-noise ratio is by adding links to your tweets. This could be a link to some current happening (Twitter’s Trending Topics are a good place to find things of interest), or it could be a link about something that’s of interest to you. Perhaps a link to an article about the economy, a wonderful photo collection, or a funny video. Remember: Whenever you add a link to a tweet, shorten the URL first. You only have 140 characters available and you don’t want the URL to take up any more space than absolutely necessary. Tools like TweetDeck and Tweetie have built-in URL shorteners to make your life easier when adding links to your tweets. 

Re-Tweet

Re-tweeting someone else’s post is a sincere form of flattery. It’s the Twitter Way of starting a conversation with “A friend told me…” A re-tweet accomplishes several things: you let your followers know what is of interest to you, you introduce them to the source so they can connect directly, and you let the originator of the message know that you appreciate their contributions on Twitter.

There are several accepted ways to re-tweet. Many of the tools like TweetDeck make it as easy as clicking one button with the mouse. Each of them will repost the message and add credit to the original poster. TweetDeck, for example uses the following syntax: “RT @TwitterName: + message” while Tweetie is adding the original poster at the end of the message: “message + (via @TwitterName)“. If you are reposting a tweet on Twitter’s website, you will have to manually copy and past the message and add “RT @TwitterName” or (via @TwitterName) or anything else to give credit to the source.

Only re-tweet content you really find interesting yourself. If you don’t find a post interesting, chances are, your followers will be bored as well. There really is an art to re-tweeting and I recommend reading How to Retweet: A Simple Guide by AJ Vaynerchuk to make you a savvy aRTist.

Keep your tweets short

Twitter has a limit of 140 characters per message. Although this doesn’t seem like a lot of space, don’t even think about using it all up if you want other people to re-tweet your message intact. You are reading this article, because you want to add followers quickly and the by far fastest way to accomplish this is to be re-tweeted by others frequently. So, if you want to leave enough space for at least one level of re-tweeting, then you need to subtract the length of your user name as well as an additional 6 characters for “RT @: “. In my case, 126 characters are the most I can use (to leave room for RT @DemoWell: ), if I want others to be able to re-tweet my messages without having to edit them to fit in the 140 character limit. It goes without saying, the shorter the message, the more room there is for multiple levels of re-tweets.

Participate in #FollowFriday

#FollowFriday is an international event, taking place, of course, on Fridays. Micah Baldwin started the #FollowFriday trend with a simple tweet: “I’m starting Follow Fridays. Every Friday, suggest a person to follow, and everyone follow him/her. Today it’s @fancyjeffrey and @w1redone.” Soon, twitter users everywhere followed Micah’s lead and tagged their messages with #FollowFriday. 

Read more about #FollowFriday directly from Micah.

Manage Your Followers

This is where the gamer’s aspect really comes to play. If you want to quickly increase your followers, you will need to carefully manage your network list. Remember those Twitter limitations? They apply for everyone, even the heavyweights on Twitter. These limitations simply mean you can’t have a massively disproportional number of friends, compared to your own followers. So you can’t just blindly click through lists of Twitter users and hundreds or thousands of them to your network, hoping that some of you will follow you back and thus increase your number of followers. You will have to do it in smaller batches. The key is to find people with the same interests and follow those. 

If they don’t follow you back, un-follow them after a couple of days. Unless they provide some type of information that you really want to tune in, there is no harm in un-following them. Rather the opposite. You don’t want to use up your Twitter limitation slots with people who don’t even bother following you back. Twitter is best experienced when keeping in mind that the twitterverse is made of two-way streets.

You will find that some people will follow you only until you are following them back and then quickly un-follow you. Often these are spammers who will end up clogging your timeline with useless messages. Don’t hesitate to un-follow anybody who’s not following you. With a few exceptions, I’m only following (and keep following) those tweeps who are actively following me as well.

Did I mention “Add Value to Your Network”?

This is really the key to your Twitter success. How quickly will depend largely on the value you provide to your network. If you write interesting, informative, humorous, or unusual messages, you’re bound the be re-tweeted more. In this sense, I hope I was able to provide a little bit of value with this article and would be delighted to connect with you on Twitter. @DemoWell.

Have you noticed? Twitter rolled out a slightly changed user interface yesterday. The right sidebar now contains a search element and the top trending topics at Twitter. The interface now also mixes tweets and search queries, perhaps as a step toward making money, described as TweetSense by John Batelle.

It’s kind of cool – the Trending Topics keeps you informed about what other tweeps are tweeting about, while the search function shows you who on Twitter is talking about the things you want to know. 

Follow me on Twitter.