Crash course twitter for my facebookfriends. It’s your party!
Hopefully after reading this post some of my facebookfriends (or others that landed here through web’s mysterious ways) you will attempt to setup a twitter account just to try it out.
In the beginning, everything is just like facebook. Nothing new. Same problems: WTF do I have to do here? This is a critical moment. Just start to follow some people, do a ’search’ (in the bottom menu of the web application) on a keyword that has your interest (french horn or so :-) and you’ll see tweets in a timeline from people that used that keyword, newest on top. Follow a couple and learn from what they do. Look who they follow, explore… this is a whole new world, yours to discover! (Geez, sounds like I have shares in this stuff…)
You’ll discover people that share so much good things and wisdom. Quite amazing. Just as an example: @PhilBaumann said (about an hour ago as I write this) Twitter is to brains what Google is to servers. If you want portals into those brains, get on Twitter. The future has arrived. Ready to fly?
This is a great comparison. If you use Twitter wisely and explore to find amazing people, you can learn TONS from them. Besides, if you don’t like what someone tweets you can always decide to unfollow them. It’s your party!
Now that you started to follow a group of people, feel free to share your thoughts. That’s what it’s all about in the first place. You may have something to say that is of interest to others. Who knows… Only one way to find out…
As more and more tweets per minute start to come in, it is a good idea to use a ‘twitter organizer’ like for instance TweetDeck. This keeps your tweets more organized and keeps them coming in near real time. If you want to know what keywords are being used NOW (what’s buzzing now) take a look at TwitScoop, this site indexes the most frequent used keywords and changes the fontsize accordingly. You see straight away what’s going on in the world. Take a look at this and you’ll see what was happening that very moment. You get the picture.
So now it’s up to you. Some will catch on to this and may even become addicted (I’m proud I am :-)
If not: your loss… If you have more questions: shoot!
Cheers, Hans.
Glad that one tweet helped spur a great blog post.
I think you may have written one of the most straightforward posts on getting people closer to understanding what Twitter can do for them. Twitter’s frivolous and simple, which makes it such a game-changer on the web.
(Ironic since I’m not much of a FaceBook person.)
Phil
A wonderful article…. In my life, I have never seen a man be so selfless in helping others around him to get along and get working. I feel good that there are people like you too. Thanks for this great weblog of yours. Its surely going to get me to go to higher places!