Does Twitter really need any introduction? Even if you don't use it, you are inundated with hashtags in every marketing campaign, you know more than you want about "140-character limits," and you know whomever has the most followers wins (even if those winners are apparently always Justin Bieber and Katy Perry). It's a source of news, entertainment, ideas, business opportunities, communication, and a lot more—pretty impressive for an 8-year-old "micro-blogging" social network that started as a group texting service.
Of course, Twitter has changed a lot since 2006. Hell, it's changed quite a bit since 2013, what with a redesigned layout for profile pages, testing a "mute" button to avoid annoying tweeters, even adding support for animated GIF files (finally!). And that's only the changes from the last six months.
So what can you, the average users of Twitter, do to get the most out of a service that's totally free and totally ubiquitous? How can you be better about tweeting and reading tweets? How can you read just the tweets that matter and avoid all the nonsense?
(And there's plenty of nonsense—just check out the real-time map of global Twitter activity at Tweetping and you'll be astonished that the service itself can keep up with the tweet barrage that is in the thousands per minute from its 255 million active users. Today, it only takes a week to add a billion new tweets. But I digress.)
You want to be the best at Twitter and avoid being one of those 550 million people with an account who've never even sent a tweet? Then slide on through your showcase of tips and tricks that will turn you into a tweet-master.
Get More Retweets
To maximize people repeating what you tweet, you should keep your post shorter than even 140 characters. In fact, shorter posts get more attention, period. If you want to garner more retweets, tweet with a link, a quote, and/or a hashtag. If you want even more: tweet an image. They're about twice as likely to get some love. Even better: infographics. Supposedly they get 832 percent more retweets than images, according to Bit Rebels.
Here's the full infographic from Visual.ly about maximizing retweets. Perhaps the ultimate way to get retweeted? Ask people to retweet you.
Here's the full infographic from Visual.ly about maximizing retweets. Perhaps the ultimate way to get retweeted? Ask people to retweet you.
Pick the Perfect Tweet Time
Thursdays at 1pm. That's it. That's when you should tweet if you want the most people to see it and retweet it and engage you. That's according to an infographic from SurePayroll and Ghergich & Co. that actually says Monday to Thurdsay, 1pm to 3pm, are the best ranges. I say Thursday because I figure that's when most people are starting to think about avoiding work (instead of Friday, when they're actively avoiding work.) Worst time is supposedly any day after 8pm, or Fridays after 3pm.
Hit the Mute
New this year is Twitter's mute feature. When you're reading tweets and get sick of the tweets from a certain someone, you can click mute to remain a follower but eliminate their posts from your Twitter timeline. What's more, if you follow someone who retweets from an account you don't like, the mute option lets you mute the original source, not the person you follow. You'll still be able to get @replies and see if the person mentions you in tweets, however. To mute, click the More button under a tweet on the desktop, or just hold your finger down on a tweet in the Twitter app for iOS or Android.
Search to Your Advantage
Twitter provides a pretty powerful search tool to look through its billions and billions of tweets. When you perform a search, click the "Advanced Search" link in the results and you'll get a page that helps you narrow not only the words used, but accounts searched, who they mention, locations, date ranges, and even if the tweet is positive or negative. You can eliminate retweets. All the options have text operators (for example use "near:" plus a location after the colon for nearby messages, or add a smiley emoticon to get only positive tweets). Best of all, when you've perfected your search parameters, you can save the search for future use. They'll appear in a drop-down menu off the search box and on your mobile apps.
Size Matters
Twitter's done a great job of embracing pictures, but not all images are created equal to the service. If you upload an image that's smaller than 440-by-222 pixels, it won't show the image in the timeline of your followers, just a link (once you click the link, the image shows, albeit strangely cropped sometimes). Bigger images are fine; they'll get resized and cropped as Twitter sees fit to display them, and a click will show the full image. There's also a limit to the file size: forget uploading anything larger than 3MB. Files must be JPG, PNG, or GIF format. On iOS, however, you can now tweet up to four photos at once, which appear in a little collage.
Tag Limitations
Not everyone likes being tagged in a photo without approval (just ask my girlfriend). If you prefer not to get tagged, go into your Twitter Security and Privacy settings and under Privacy, check either "Only allow people I follow to tag me in photos" or go nuclear with "Do not allow anyone to tag me in photos." You can remove tags however: click the More menu under the tweet with the picture in question to select "Remove tag from photo." If you block the user who tagged you, that also means they can't do it again and your tagged name won't show on that person's images anymore.
Chat Up the Twitter-verse
This one is for the marketers. A #tweetchat isn't really a chat like we're used to with instant messages or chatrooms, but instead an ongoing conversation between multiple Twitter users. They find and join the tweetchat by searching on a unique hashtag that you create. What you do is create the hashtag, pick a time for the chat, promote the hell out of it, and be ready to talk to people who show up. (Thanks to Catalysis for the tip. (Image)
Master the Hashtag
We've said it before, hashtags—those words or mashed-together phrase proceeded by the hashmark (#)—are useful for searches, for marketing, to see trends, and more. But don't go crazy. One relevant hashtag is far better for your tweet than a bunch of them. Salesforce did a report that says more than two hashtags per tweet ("hashtag stuffing") reduces the chance of not only retweets, but also getting read. Other tips: Use capital letters when needed (#PCMagLive is easier to read than #pcmaglive) or underscores (#Who_Shot_JR). And remember you can use hashtags on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, and elsewhere. (Image)
Make Semi-Private Replies/Mentions Public
This is a long-time trick, now with a twist. When two or more people engage on Twitter, replies to the person generally start with their handle, like @egriffith. The back and forth is only seen by the people in the conversation, AND by people who follow both conversants—that's "narrowcasting." The trick is, you put a period (".") before the handle and that makes it public—"broadcasting" to all. Any Twitter aficionado knows this.
However, a twist on the trick is that it does not have to be a period. It can be any symbol (like a caret: > ). In fact, it could even be a zero-width space character, so it'll look like there's nothing there. In Windows, you type it by hitting Alt-8203 (though doing it directly in a Web browser creates the ASCII symbol for "male"; it works fine in other apps.) Here's how to type one on Mac.
However, a twist on the trick is that it does not have to be a period. It can be any symbol (like a caret: > ). In fact, it could even be a zero-width space character, so it'll look like there's nothing there. In Windows, you type it by hitting Alt-8203 (though doing it directly in a Web browser creates the ASCII symbol for "male"; it works fine in other apps.) Here's how to type one on Mac.
Power Twitter with ifttt
IFTTT is a gift that powers connections between just about every Web-based service you can imagine, and a few you can't. For a time last year, Twitter wasn't supported by the service (that was Twitter's fault), but now the Twitter channel is more than ready. You can use Twitter to trigger an event whenever you post, or post with a specific hashtag, or post from a specific area, or even if you just favorite a tweet. Or you can let other triggers perform actions on Twitter, like creating a tweet when you post to other services, sending you a direct message, even changing your profile pic. The most popular IFTTT recipes for Twitter: sync your Facebook and Twitter profile pics; put all your tweets in a Google spreadsheet; save fave tweets to Pocket; and so many more. Create a few yourself to share.
Get All Your Tweets
Don't trust Twitter to keep all your pithy 140-character musings forever. Thankfully, they have a facility to provide you the backup of everything you've posted. In Settings on the desktop, on the Account page, click the button that says "Request your archive." They'll email you a link to download a ZIP file you can store forever yourself.
Go Mobile without Apps
There are very nice mobile apps for Twitter (even on BlackBerry and Windows Phone)—but they're not necessary. Remember, Twitter started out as a way for groups to communicate via SMS text, and that's still possible. Just add your mobile phone number to your Twitter account (on the Mobile tab, under Settings). You can then check off a litanyof choices: get tweets (only if you've enabled mobile notifications on the handle you're following), get direct messages, new follower notifications, mentions, replies, retweets of your own tweets, etc. You can even set up a sleep time, so nothing comes in overnight. And of course, reply to that text and it goes live on Twitter for all your followers. Text ON or OFF to turn notifications on or off; You can also use commands like FOLLOW or UNFOLLOW or LEAVE, each followed by a Twitter handle (leave is like mute). There's many more possibilities on Twitter help.
Keep Track of Links
Sometimes you need to keep track of what happens with a link you publish online, even in a tweet. There's several service to help you do that. Clicktotweet, for example, provides full analytics on clicks from your followers. But you can also click the Gear icon on Twitter.com and select "Twitter Ads" for a quick look at how many people clicked the links in your recent tweets.
Embed to Share
You've seen it on a Web page probably—someone shared a person's tweet and it includes links, the profile pic, a follow button, everything. That's an embed, just like you can do with a YouTube video. If you want to share a tweet somewhere other than Twitter with more than just a link, it's the way to go. Click the More menu under any tweet and select Embed Tweet to get the code you use. It should look like this when you're done:
Schenectady, I am inside you. I hope I don't catch a disease.
— Evan Dashevsky (@haldash) June 20, 2014Set Up Advanced Security
Major Twitter accounts have had security issues in the past, they will again. But Twitter's trying. It introduced Login Verification to provide a two-step (two-factor) authentication, where you need to have your phone close by when logging into Twitter, so it can send an extra code to your phone before you get access. This is far from foolproof, but better than not having it at all. You can find it in the Settings, under Security and Privacy.
Twitter also offers temporary app passwords for signing into other accounts that use the Twitter login, even some of Twitter's own apps. You do this on the Password tab in Settings. The temp is usually a 12-character combo of letters and numbers, and it's good for about an hour.
Twitter also offers temporary app passwords for signing into other accounts that use the Twitter login, even some of Twitter's own apps. You do this on the Password tab in Settings. The temp is usually a 12-character combo of letters and numbers, and it's good for about an hour.