Twitter for newbies

If your wondering were much of the news and gossip comes from by users of his forum, the answer is without a doubt 'Twitter'
I hear off lots of people on this board and in general they don’t bother with Twitter because they do not understand how to use it.
I've come up with this thread to give people a basic understanding of how to use twitter and how to get information, news and gossip off it. I've used various guides to get the information off to share with you.



Getting started
1. Twitter allows you to send short messages to tell the world what you're doing, thinking, reading or whatever else you feel like saying. If you use Facebook, think of it as being like the status updates. The service allows you to follow people and be followed by people. The people you follow will form your network and their updates will appear on your Twitter homepage. The people who follow you have chosen to have you in their network and see your updates. However, Twitter is asynchronous. You don’t need to follow everyone who follows you. So you may be in my network but I don’t have to be in yours.


2. Go to Twitter and create an account. You can give yourself any username you like but it’s best to choose something that people who know you will recognise: that will make it easier for them to find and follow you.

3. Fill in your biography. Say something about yourself. It helps people to decide whether they should follow you.

4. Post your first tweet. It should go in the box underneath the question “What are you doing?” and it must be 140 characters or fewer. Soon you’ll start building your network and you’ll want to have something on your page when your first visitors arrive. Try to post something that, in conjunction with your biography, will give people a reason to follow you. “Trying to understand Twitter” is fine as a first post but you need to follow it up very quickly with something more individual. Try posting a link to the most interesting article you’ve read recently, for example.

Start building your network

5. Start building your network. Look for friends and colleagues who are already using the site by clicking ‘find people’ at the top of the page. When you find someone who you want to add to your network, click on their name to see their page and then click ‘follow’.

6. Following people is the easiest way to let them know you are there and some of them will soon start following you in return. Your page will display a count of the number of people following you and the numbers you are following. You can stop following people in your network at any time by going to their page, clicking ‘following’ and then clicking ‘remove’.

7. Each time you find someone you want to follow take a look at who they are following. Add anyone who looks interesting and even a few people you aren’t sure about. The more, the merrier. Try to add around 100 people so that you have a busy network. Remember – you can prune your network as you get a feel for who’s who.
Don’t be disheartened if it takes a while for your number of followers to grow.

Talking to people

8. Most of the time you’ll be posting updates on what you’re doing. And if that’s all you do, that’s fine. Don’t feel obliged to keep your followers entertained.

9. Sometimes you’ll want to join a conversation. You can send a public reply to people by putting @ before their username and then typing your message. So putting @shanerichmond would direct your reply to me. The person you are replying to doesn’t need to be someone you are following and doesn’t need to be following you for the @ system to work. On Twitter.com, a reply button will be visible when you hold your cursor over a message. Clicking this will add the @ automatically.
Click Settings on Twitter.com and then Notices to decide how @ replies are displayed within your network. If you choose “all @ replies” you’ll see conversations people in your network are having with others. This is a good way to find new people to follow.
If you want to send a message to someone but don’t want all your followers to see it, you can send a direct message. Put d and then the person’s username to send a private message. Remember to leave a space, like this: d shanerichmond. You can also click Direct Messages on the right-hand side of Twitter.com to get a box specifically for sending direct messages.

10. If one of your followers says something so brilliant that you want to share it with your followers, you can “retweet” it. The etiquette for doing this is to put “retweet”, “retweeting” or just “RT” at the start of your message then add the @ symbol and the person’s username and then their message. For example, type “RT @shanerichmond” to retweet one of my messages. It’s acceptable to edit their message to make it fit the 140 character limit.

In a nutshell.

Create an account and search for a load of people(Celebrities) you are interested in and start following them.

As Karl said, but it's not just celebrities, you can follow Football clubs official news accounts, transfer gossip accounts etc

And by using a hash tag search (#) you can search all tweets across twitter for info on something

For example I always search for #cardiff city, if anybody has mentioned Cardiff city in a tweet you'll get a copy of that tweet, that's were the majority of this boards gossip comes from, for example when Henrikson was linked to us a German newspaper had mentioned CCFC in a tweet and someone searching for #ccfc found it.

if your into your betting (Horses) follow this person... couple of good winners already today...

https://twitter.com/#!/TopTipster36

To be honest. I made an account in 2009 and didn't use it until 2010 because I didn't know where to start.

So it can be quite confusing.

To be honest. I made an account in 2009 and didn't use it until 2010 because I didn't know where to start.

So it can be quite confusing.

When you do take the plunge and use it properly it's a wealth of info tho, agreed?

To be honest. I made an account in 2009 and didn't use it until 2010 because I didn't know where to start.

So it can be quite confusing.

When you do take the plunge and use it properly it's a wealth of info tho, agreed?

Definitely.

Click Settings on Twitter.com and then Notices to decide how @ replies are displayed within your network. If you choose “all @ replies” you’ll see conversations people in your network are having with others. This is a good way to find new people to follow.

This was dropped years ago. Now you just see all @ replies between the people you follow, before you could change to see every @ reply done by the people you followed - which was pointless at times, as you saw the reply but not the original tweet! Or, could be set to none.

Twitter for me has put together RSS feeds/email newsletters (just check Twitter rather than visiting individual websites now) & main forums chit chat.

@gary_sullivan_

There you go you can start there!