Katy Young's Guide to Twitter. Everything a first time user should know about Twitter.

Katy Young’s Guide to... Twitter
Step by step guide followed by advanced techniques guide21/08/13

Katy Young’s Guide to... TwitterKaty Young’s Guide to... Twitter
INTRODUCTION
Twitter is a social media platform where users ‘tweet’ content.
It’s culture is open and encourages users to tweet without needing formal
recognition from other users.

CONTENTS
Beginner’s Step by Step Guide Page Number
1. Begin by entering your information 5
2. Describe yourself with a photo and bio 6
3. Email confirmation 7
4. The Top Menu 8
5. Choose a background photo 9
6. Follow interesting people 10
7. Tweet 12
8. Retweet, Reply or Favourite 15
Expert’s Guide Page Number
Including images and videos in tweets 19
Direct messages 22
Quote tweets 23
Privacy settings 25
Custom background 26
Lists 28
URL shorteners 31
Scheduling tweets 33
Websites and Blogs 34

CONTENTS
4
This section is designed to help you navigate through the process of creating your
profile.
I advise having this guide open alongside your web browser as you set up your account.
It includes the key tips and facts I wish someone has told me as I was designing my
Twitter profile. I have shared them in this guide to help you avoid any social media
gaffes.
BEGINNER’S STEP BY STEP GUIDE
BEGINNER

CONTENTS
5
. 1. BEGIN BY ENTERING YOUR INFORMATION
KEY TIPS
• Choose a username similar to your
real name.
• It has to be unique.
• It cannot contain spaces.
• Keep your username short. The
maximum is 15 characters.
Twitter will then move to the next step of asking you to ‘follow’ some celebrities to get you started.
Just choose some of the suggested ones at random. You can add more people later.

CONTENTS
6
. 2. DESCRIBE YOURSELF WITH A PHOTO AND BIO
KEY TIPS
• Choose a recognisable,
zoomed in photograph.
• The image should be in JPG,
GiF or PNG format and of
maximum size 700k
• Your bio should be a short,
precise summary of your job,
interests etc. The maximum is
160 characters.

CONTENTS
7
. 3. EMAIL CONFIRMATION
You will need to log in to your email address. Twitter will have sent you an email with a
link you should click on in order to confirm your account.

CONTENTS
8
. 4. THE TOP MENU
Home is your ‘newsfeed’ where everyone you follow’s tweets are displayed.
Connect is like your ‘notifications’. It’s where you can see who’s mentioned you in a tweet, who’s
started following you, any retweets or favourites of your tweets etc. These are called interactions.
Discover suggests people to follow and popular retweets etc.
Me shows your profile page.

CONTENTS
9
. 5. CHOOSE A BACKGROUND PHOTO
KEY TIPS
• Your background photo can be of
anything but remember that the
middle will be obscured by your
profile photo.
• Get creative like these examples
below.

CONTENTS
10
. 6. FOLLOW INTERESTING PEOPLE
To follow someone is to subscribe to their updates. This means that all of their tweets (posts) will
appear in your news feed but they won’t see yours unless they follow you back.
KEY TIPS
• Search for topics or specific people in the
box along the top bar to find users you’re
interested in following.
• Use the ‘Who to Follow’ box on the left
hand side. Once you’ve followed more
people this box will become more suited to
your interests.
Twitter itself says that “Reading tweets and discovering new information... is where you’ll find the
most value on Twitter.” so who you follow matters.

CONTENTS
11
SIDE NOTE:
Once you’ve followed someone you can use their profile to follow more people.
For example, if I am interested in Economics I might follow BBC Economics Editor Stephanie Flanders.
I can then look through her 270 ‘following’ to find more people’s accounts I might be interested in.
KEY TIPS
• A tick by the side of someone’s
name means that their account has
been verified and is not a parody
or fan’s account.

CONTENTS
12
. 7. TWEET
To compose a tweet click on the blue box in the top right hand corner.
There are several types of tweet. The simplest is a post.
KEY TIPS
• Remember each tweet
is limited to a maximum
of 140 characters.
• On a Mac the hash
key is Alt-3

CONTENTS
13
When posting about a topic you can also include a #Hashtag.
This means that when people search for this Hashtag your tweet will appear.
KEY TIPS
• You can hashtag any word or phrase you want to
but remember not to include spaces.
• When lots of users tweet the same hashtag it is
then ‘trending’. Trends are updated immediately
so they show the current ‘hot topics’.

CONTENTS
14
Another way is to ‘tag’ someone in a post. You do this by including @username.
They will get a notification of this.
A mention can either be in the middle of a tweet...
...or at the beginning.
If its at the beginning of the post it is as if you are talking directly to that
person.

CONTENTS
15
. 8. RETWEET, REPLY OR FAVOURITE
You can also respond to other people’s tweets.
One way is to retweet them.
This means their tweet will appear on your profile and all of your followers will also see it.
KEY TIPS
• A retweet is the
strongest form of
compliment.

CONTENTS
16
Another way is to reply to their tweet directly. This is a way to express an opinion about what they
have said.
Your replies will not appear on the other user’s profile page and will only be seen by people who
follow both you and the person you’re replying to.
If you click ‘Expand’ a box appears giving you the option to reply.
KEY TIPS
• A reply is similar to commenting
on someone’s post or writing on
their Facebook wall in response.

CONTENTS
17
A third way is to favourite a tweet. It will then appear in the ‘Favorites’ section of your profile which
can be accessed from the menu on the left hand side.
The user will get a notification (interaction) of your favourite.
KEY TIPS
• A ‘favourite’ is
equivalent to a Facebook

CONTENTS
18
EXPERT’S GUIDE
Once you’ve mastered the basics, here are some more advanced useful Twitter tools.
EXPERT

CONTENTS
19
INCLUDING IMAGES AND VIDEOS IN TWEETS
Images within tweets will appear as a link (pic.twitter.com) which your followers then click on to view
the picture.
Therefore it uses up some of your 140 characters (usually around 22 characters).
You include a photo by composing a tweet and then clicking on the camera icon in the bottom left
corner, which opens up a window to select the photo from the file where it’s saved on your computer.
KEY TIPS
• You can only post one image per
Tweet.
• These images must be in JPG, GiF or
PNG format but they can be
maximum size of 3MB.

CONTENTS
20
For example, this tweet by The Economist contains a website URL followed by an image URL.
Clicking on ‘View photo’ reveals the photo in the tweet.

CONTENTS
21
Uploading videos is slightly more complicated.
It requires you to set up an account on a video uploading service such as YouTube or Vimeo.
Twitter does not let you store videos on their website so you are effectively just including a URL
to where your video is hosted elsewhere on the internet.
Another option is to use YFrog. This site allows you to log in with Twitter and post tweets
including photos and videos directly from there.
You can post videos more easily from a mobile device. Instagram now has a video capability.
Videos posted from Instagram to Twitter will appear in URLs just as an Instragram photo does.
There is also the mobile app Vine that enables you to post short videos up to 6 seconds long to
Twitter.

CONTENTS
22
DIRECT MESSAGES
A direct message is a way to send a user a private message, similar to an email but on Twitter.
Click on the wheel in the top right hand corner, and in the drop down menu select ‘Direct
messages’.
Here you can view your messages and compose new ones.
KEY TIPS
• You can only send direct messages to
people who follow you.
• But you can receive direct messages from
anyone who you have followed.

CONTENTS
23
QUOTE TWEETS
A standard retweet just reposts the original person’s message. However sometimes you
might want to share their message adding your own comment aswell. This is a quote tweet.
On the Twitter mobile app this is very easy to do. When you click on Retweet, an option
appears to Quote Tweet instead.
KEY TIPS
• Quote tweets only work if the original
tweet is fairly short already else you
won’t have any characters left for your
own comment.

CONTENTS
24
On the computer if you want to quote tweet you have to do it manually.
This involves copying and pasting the original tweet into your own ‘new tweet’ blue box.
Then you add your own comment and remember to write “RT @username” so that it’s clear
it is a retweet and not your own content.

CONTENTS
25
PRIVACY SETTINGS
It is possible to set your Twitter account to private. This means that only people who follow you can see
your tweets and in order to follow you people send a request which you can then approve or decline.
You can do this by clicking on the wheel in the top right hand corner and choosing ‘Settings’.
Scroll down on the new screen and you can tick a box to ‘Protect my Tweets’.

CONTENTS
26
CUSTOM BACKGROUND
There are some really good examples of custom backgrounds. Especially as a business, charity or
even a university society this is a great way of personalising your profile, or as a designer of
showcasing your work.
A popular technique is to embed your company info into your background.
One example is Pepsi.
KEY TIPS
• A background picture
should be maximum size
200k and of dimensions
1600px wide by 1200px
tall (in a Google search this
is the 2MP size).
• A simple left hand column
picture should be 200px or
235px wide.

CONTENTS
27
Websites such as twittergallery.com have a selection of custom backgrounds.
There are also websites like freetwitterdesigner.com which allow you to create your own design, say
with your company logo.
Once you’ve decided on a background some applications will let you log in to
Twitter and change it for you straight away.
Otherwise you will have to change it manually. Go to the ‘Settings’ tab.
On the new screen select ‘Design’ from the left hand side menu.
From this page you can upload the photo to set as your custom background.

CONTENTS
28
. LISTS
A twitter list is a group of Twitter users organised by what those people have in common.
You can follow other people’s Twitter lists.
Lists can be found be clicking on a separate tab on the left hand side of a user’s profile.

CONTENTS
29
Once you open a particular list you can then choose to ‘Subscribe’ to it, another button which appears
on the left hand side.
On your profile it will now appear under your ‘Subscribed to’ Lists.

CONTENTS
30
Additionally you can create your own lists. You don’t have to be following someone to add them to
one of your lists.
Lists can be used to organise users you are following, or simply for your own and/or others
reference.
However lists are for reading only. You cannot send tweets only to the users on a list.
KEY TIPS
• Each list can contain up to 5000 people
and each user can have a maximum of
1000 lists.
• Lists can be either public or private.
• A good example of a public list might be
‘Top 50 journalists’.

CONTENTS
31
. URL SHORTENERS
In a tweet you can include a link to a website.
However with only 140 characters some website URLs could use up the whole tweet.
Twitter will automatically shorten any URLs down to 22 characters. (It does this after you’ve hit the
‘Tweet’ button.)
However to shorten them even further use a URL shortener like Bit.ly or Google url shortener, which
usually only takes up around 17 characters.
If you’re going to be posting links often then creating an account on Bitly is good because it allows
you to save URLs.

CONTENTS
32
For example if I wanted to tweet a link to Ricky Gervais’s blog I would copy the website
address.
And paste this into Google’s url shortener.
It then generates a shorter version for you to put in your tweet. This will still be a hyperlink to
your chosen website.

CONTENTS
33
. SCHEDULING TWEETS
This is a useful way to keep your Twitter updated without having to be constantly logged in.
SocialOomph, TweetDeck, Buffer App and HootSuite are all free programmes that allow you to schedule
tweets in advance, amongst other functions.
HootSuite allows you to manage multiple feeds at once, connecting up to 5 social media accounts on the
free version. It is also available on Mobile apps too.
You can compose a tweet and then choose a date and time for it to be published.
KEY TIPS
• Schedule tweets each morning so they appear at
regular intervals to keep your profile at the top of
your followers’ feeds.
• You can schedule tweets to appear whilst events
are happening to create a buzz. Include an
agreed Hashtag so that people attending can
tweet about your event too.
• Go for odd times like 4.33pm instead of 4.30 so
the scheduling isn’t as obvious.

CONTENTS
34
. WEBSITES AND BLOGS
It is important to integrate your website with your Twitter profile.
One way is to add Twitter buttons to your website page. To do this go to the Twitter Resources page
and choose ‘Buttons’: https://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons.
For a blog post you may want readers to share a link to the article, or for a business you may want
people to follow your company Twitter account.
Click through the options and Twitter will produce a code for you to copy and paste into your
website’s HTML.
If you’re using WordPress to blog, the ‘Publicize’ feature means that a tweet will automatically be
sent whenever you release a new blog post.
There is also the ‘Twitter Widget’ which displays a sidebar of your latest tweets.

35
. WITH THANKS TO...
Alex Mizrahi, Anthony Quintano, Stephanie Flanders, Ellen Degeneres, Barack
Obama, The Economist, David Cameron, Pepsi, Time Out London and Ricky
Gervais for the use of their material for examples.

Katy Young's Guide to Twitter. Everything a first time user should know about Twitter.

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)

Empfohlen

Empfohlen (20)

Katy Young's Guide to Twitter. Everything a first time user should know about Twitter.