The post(s) in which I explain Twitter to Lorie – Part Two

I have this friend, Lorie, who is a Twitter newbie. She asked how she replies to someone on Twitter, so in the previous post I explained it to her in a mere two thousand words.

Now it’s time to move on to other things, like the sidebar on the Twitter page. Sign in and go to http://twitter.com/ and you’ll see the home page, which looks something like this..

Granted, mine is prettier than yours because I’ve dressed up the colors and inserted a custom background, but hey.. you have nice hair.

Before we get to the sidebar, we need to talk about that little white navigation strip above it on the right, and before we do that I need to address something I forgot to address in the last post, which is..

RETWEETING

Retweeting is simply reposting a tweet that you like so much you want everyone who follows you to see it. So how do you do it? Well, as of now there’s no “retweet button” to click on the Twitter page, just like there’s no direct message button. The only thing they let you do with a click is reply, which is that curly arrow to the right of someone’s tweet. To direct message them you have to type..

d rhodester followed by your message.

Of course, you put the person’s username where I put rhodester in that example. Please don’t bombard me with direct messages.

But to retweet something from the Twitter page, you have to manually copy/paste it into the little box, and if you want to give them credit you can put their username in front of it with RT in front of the username. I know, right? Lot of friggin’ work! This is because Twitter doesn’t really want you retweeting things. They don’t like you all that much when it comes right down to it. They don’t even like your hair (but I do.)

Retweeting is something that got added to those programs you can download to use Twitter, like Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop and others. The geeks who made that stuff put in a little retweet button so that if you like a tweet and want to share it with everyone, you click it and it automatically goes out to all your followers.

If you really must retweet something from the Twitter page and you go to the trouble of copy/pasting it, be sure to give credit. Don’t just retweet something like it’s yours, which is a really good way to get yelled at.

So, that’s retweeting.

Alright, back on the Twitter hompage, you see that little white navigation bar on the upper right?

Yeah, that’s it. The little links on it are fairly self-explanatory but lets take a look at them anyway..

Home – Click this and it will show the latest tweets from the people you follow. As you go down the list you will see a “more” link at the bottom. Click that and get more added on. Below that will be a “more” link. Click that and more will be added on. Below that will be a “more” link. Click that and more will be added on. Below that will be a “more” link. Click that and more will be added on.. ad infinitum.

Profile – Click that and it will show your profile and just YOUR latest tweets. This is what people see when they click on your username out there in Twitterland, and you will see this when clicking on other people’s usernames. Again there’s that helpful “more” link at the bottom if you’re really bored.

Find People – Type in “rhodester”.. voila, you found me! Type in “Taylor Swift”.. voila, you found her and about a hundred imposters, plus fan profiles and dedication sites. Sucks to be her.

Settings – When you click on settings, you get different tabs to click on, and there’s a lot so I’m not going to go through it all. You’re pretty smart and can figure it out, so I’m just going to give you a few tips..

When you have the ACCOUNT TAB selected, look down at the bottom and find the little “protect my updates” box. Don’t check it. If you did check it, then uncheck it. People hate “protected updates,” which means that only your followers can see your tweets when they click on that profile link we talked about earlier. I guess some people like the privacy of it, but if someone follows me and I take a look at their profile to consider following them back, I won’t if they have “protected updates.” It’s like going on the radio and only talking to the people in the studio.

When you select the DESIGN TAB, you can change your colors and add a background wallpaper. The colors are easy but the backgrounds are tricky because Twitter put the background wallpaper section on their Siberian servers and it gets pretty cold there, plus it’s far, far away. If you have trouble with it, it’s best to just stick with the default ones or ask someone who knows how to do that sort of thing for help.

Help – Here you’ll find most of the stuff I’m talking about in this post, but it’s really dry and there is absolutely no mention of Taylor Swift or horses.

Sign out – This is the tab I’d like all the spammers, marketers and experts on virtually everything to click on, but they won’t.

And now we head to the sidebar, which is a lot of fun to play around with. You could spend all day on the sidebar, tickling it, teasing it and simply having a blast.

Here’s mine..

Starting at the top you see my manly avatar depicting Ward Cleaver drinking coffee from a tea cup. It’s manly because he’s NOT sticking his pinky out. Not Ward Cleaver.. he would never do that. Good thing he never found out about Beaver being gay.

If you click on the avatar picture or the username next to it on a person’s Twitter page, it will show you their profile and that person’s “tweet-stream.” If you’re on your own page it will show you your own “tweet-stream.” Yes, “tweet-stream” IS a funny term! It’s like you drank too much tweet or something and now you’re in the bathroom making a “tweet-stream.” Suddenly I feel like I’m at summer camp.

Click on HOME at the navigation bar above it to have it return to the main home page.. or click on the word Twitter above the avatar. So many options! It’s like Disneyland!

Now, under the avatar and username on the sidebar you have an indicator that shows you how many people you’re following, how many are following you, and how many updates (tweets) you’ve done. As you can see, I’m following 759 and being followed by 758. I haven’t a clue who most of them are. I’ve updated (tweeted) 7,047 times. I figure that if I spent thirty seconds composing and sending each update tweet, then that’s nearly two and a half days of my life that I’ve spent in the bathroom creating a tweet-stream.

If you click on the following and follower indicators it will show you a list of them, and to the right of each user you will see a little thing Twitter has put there wherein you can decide what to do with them. A neat trick is to click on your followers, and then decide if you want to follow them back, send them a direct message, reply to them, unfollow them or block their nasty ass.

Here’s what my follower list looks like. You can click the picture to make it screen size if you’re like me, meaning you’re old and stuff and can’t see too well these days..

Under the part that says “Your 754 followers” you can see two little boxes. These select whether you want a simple display of your followers or a display that gives you too much information. I have it set on simple, because if I really want to know about any particular one I can just click on their picture or name and their profile comes up.

You can see that I have a little green check beside ALL my followers because I’m following them back. You don’t need to follow everyone back, it’s totally up to you. I do but I ignore them, which will be our little secret, okay?

Over to the far right is that selection gizmo I was talking about earlier. Click it and you’re given options as to what to do with your followers. If Rhodester is one of your followers, select “follow.” If anyone else is a follower, select whatever you want.

If this guy is a follower..

You probably can’t select BLOCK fast enough.

This is a good time to talk about douchebags marketers. You will meet them on Twitter because they will follow you, along with thousands of other people. Our friend in the picture is following 56 people while being followed by 33,255, which is a fairly good indication that he doesn’t really care about YOU, he just wants to sell you something. He also wants to point at you. He’s only following 56 because these kind of douchebags marketers follow you and then unfollow you after you follow them back, and it’s all done with automated software called “bots.”

You’ve seen the Terminator movies, right? Where the big scary android goes looking for Sarah Connor so that he can kill her, and he just knocks off a bunch of Sarah Connors until he gets the right one? Well, it’s kind of like that, only these Terminators don’t kill you, they follow you, and the only way for you to vanquish them is with the BLOCK function, because if you don’t.. ready for it?

THEY’LL BE BACK!

You may be wanting to ask me why you should be concerned if the pointy-finger guy above follows you, because hey, if you don’t follow him back you won’t get his messages and he can’t direct message you, riiiiight??

He can still reply to you.

I’ve actually tweeted something like, “Whoa, Michael Jackson passed away.. he sure was an icon of pop music” only to get the reply, “Yes, and despite his overall appearance his teeth were beautifully white thanks to (insert link to tooth-whitening website here.)

So, yeah.. just block them. They won’t notice.

Someone, somewhere – probably our friend shown above who likes to point at us – is bound to point this out..

Yes, Taylor Swift is only following 20 people and being followed by 845,793. But there’s a big difference in that she didn’t follow me first to get me to follow her back, and she doesn’t want to sell me things. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if I bought her CDs and a few concert tickets when she’s in town, but her tweet-stream isn’t all about that.

I kind of blushed there a little when I mentioned Taylor Swift’s tweet-stream.

Someone recently ranted about celebrities having thousands of followers, if not millions like Ashton Kutcher, and yet they only follow a handful back. He said it wasn’t fair and he felt they were narcissistic in doing that. I disagree and I’ll tell you why..

Imagine you’re a celebrity. You have thousands of followers, all of whom can reply to your tweets. You tweet something and BAM! you get a thousand replies, most of which you can’t possibly read because there just isn’t enough time; you have movies to make and records to produce. You’d like to read them all and you give it a good try, but alas.. it’s just not possible.

Along with your thousands of fans, mom and dad are following you on Twitter. So’s your brother, your agent, your boyfriend, girlfriend or spouse, and a handful of close friends. You follow them back for two reasons..

1. You like what they have to say on Twitter.
2. They can DIRECT MESSAGE YOU PRIVATELY.

If Taylor Swift, Ashton Kutcher or any well-known celeb followed back all of their fans they’d get the same amount of direct messages that they do replies, and it’d become unmanageable. So following back, for them, is like giving out their cell-phone number.

Before we get back to the sidebar stuff, I feel kind of bad about what I said concerning pointy-finger guy above, so I should clarify a few points about marketing..

First of all, it’s not evil. There’s nothing wrong with it and it’s in common use in our society. Everywhere you go you see marketing techniques, some of which are a little more aggressive than others. There’s a certain group – a very LARGE group – that likes to use the way Twitter is set-up so that they can market products to you, and they have that right. It’s all free to use and as long as someone doesn’t violate Twitter’s terms of service, which changes almost daily by the way, they can follow you and reply to you all they want.

And you’re free to block them, if you don’t care for having “BUY THIS! TRY THIS! USE THIS!” messages sent to you all day long. Once again, I recommend blocking them as opposed to just not following them, because they will unfollow you and then follow you again later, over and over, until you break down and admit that, YES, DAMMIT, I AM SARAH CONNOR!

And then they will sign you up for a ten day free trial on tooth-whitener.

Maybe now pointy-finger guy won’t sue me. I’d better ask my lawyer just to be sure (she’s sitting over there on the sofa, next to our cat) so we’ll continue with the sidebar stuff and other Twitter lessons in the next post.

RhodesTer on Twitter/Subscribe to this blog

Tagged as: Taylor Swift, Twitter, twitter celebrities, Twitter instruction