My adventures in Twitterland

Perhaps some of you noticed an increase in activity on my twitter feed. I decided today was the day when I was finally going to “get” tweeter. So with lots of hope I opened my twitter account and….had no idea what to do.

I found a tutorial who started talking about what to do/what not to do…but still, I just didn’t “get” what I was supposed to say/do with it! Fortunately this tutorial did mention Tweetdeck so I figured I’d start there. While messing around on tweetdeck, the fabulous Katy, Charlie’s mom, came to my rescue! Katy kindly explained to me how to organize columns, what sorts of content to publish, proper tweeter protocol, what the # and other symbols meant, and more.

So here’s a summary of what I learned today, maybe this will help other twitter aspirees (and for a lot of this I’m going to quote Katy, I am just writing this as a record of what I learned and in case others are interested):

* Don’t just talk about yourself or what you’re doing. Imagine that you are at a cocktail party with all sorts of different people, and you are having conversations with all of them. With some you can talk about your kids, with others about business, with others about what’s going on in the world. Try and keep it interesting and varied. Also, if others say something that is interesting, retweet them or reply to them to engage them in conversations.

* Twitter is a great place to share information that you find interesting – news articles, blog posts, cool videos and/or photos, etc. Or if you have a random interesting thought – this is a great place to share it.

* I was a little bit confused about what to talk about. In my life there are several “groups” – family, special needs mommies, spiritual friends, work colleagues. I figured if I talked about Nathan, the work colleagues wouldn’t be interested, and if I talked about work, my special needs mommy friends wouldn’t be interested, etc. But what I understood today is that Twitter is ultimately about people – and everyone has multiple facets to their life – so it’s okay to talk about all of them.

* The key to twitter is TOOLS. Twitter itself is not very user friendly. However, there are many tools that make using twitter easy and fun:

– tweetdeck: Allows you to view many things at once – what the people you are following are tweeting about, direct messages sent to you, when people mention you, and more. It also allows you to create lists and view what people in those lists are saying. I created a list called “CP” and can now keep an eye on what other CP moms are saying.

– twitterfeed: You can set up tweeterfeed so it automatically updates facebook and twitter when you publish a blog post. You can also set up google alerts and set them up on twitterfeed to update your FB and Twitter accounts.

– socialoomph: Allows you to schedule tweets so you can write a whole bunch of them at once, and they are published at a specified time frame. If inspiration hits, you can do a whole bunch at a time about a topic, so you’re not always having to look for instant content.

– alltop.com & popurls.com: If you need inspiration and want to find ideas to tweet about, these two sites are FULL of popular articles and topics to inspire you.

– search.twitter.com: Search twitter conversations by topic. Enter a keyword and find people talking about that topic, and what they are saying. Good way to find people to follow, as well as to engage in conversations.

– twitpic.com: Allows you to upload and publish photos to twitter.

– bit.ly: Since you can only post a limited number of characters on twitter, you can use this service to shorten your URL’s and to track the number of clicks to each URL.

Of course this is only the beginning of my twitterventure so my knowledge is quite limited. It was fun learning about Twitter and finally understanding what everyone is/has been raving about!

THANK YOU KATY FOR ALL OF YOUR HELP TODAY – YOU ROCK!

Update!

Here are a few more tools that people recommended:

* twellow.com – directory where you can find people by subjects
* tweepml.org – you can find lists of people that others created, and automatically follow them all
* hootsuite.com – allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts and organize your twitter strategy
* wefollow.com – directory of top twitterers