You've signed up for Twitter. You've created your profile and tweeted your first tweet. But unless you only want to use Twitter to tell the world what YOU're doing (which is highly frowned upon, by the way), it's time to start really interacting with your Tweeps (Twitter Peeps).

@Replies Mentions

Update 10/29/09: Note that Twitter changed the term @Reply to Mention a while back, because people use them to refer to other Twitterers or to direct a tweet to a particular person, even if it's not a reply to a tweet from that person. You can consider the terms interchangeable from the point of view of how to use them, so I'm not going to update every instance of the term in my earlier posts.

Once you've made your first tweet, it probably won't be long before someone responds to you. You'll know this, because their tweet will show up in your timeline with your username at the beginning, prefaced by @. For example, when I wrote a tweet about yesterday's T4L post, one of my followees wrote back this message with a request for me to cover a particular topic (which, FYI, I will be doing next week).

Now, here's one incredibly important thing you need to know about @Replies. Unless you're on Twitter constantly and watching every single tweet as it comes in, there's a good chance you'll miss some @Replies directed at you. The good news is, these are all listed on a page that you can access from the @Replies link in the right-hand nav bar. The bad news is that there is no alert system to tell you that you have a new one. I've known so many people who didn't find out for days or weeks that they had messages directed at them sitting there.

Tomorrow I'll be writing about a great application to help you manage your Twitter activities, which also makes it easy to see when you have received new @Replies. In the meantime, it's a good habit to always click on that link whenever you visit your home page during the day just to see if something's come in since your last visit.

Also, it's quite possible that you've written dozens of tweets since the one a person has replied to, so you may not remember which one that was (especially if their reply is something generic, like "Thanks!"). If you click on where it says "in reply to," you'll get taken to a page with the original tweet. For example, if I click on "in reply to EKricfalusi" below:

I get taken to this page:

Note: You may also receive @Replies that aren't actually a response to something you tweeted. A person can write a tweet directed to you specifically by manually adding the @[USERNAME] at the beginning of the tweet. Those messages will also end up on your @Replies page.

Of course, you may also want to respond to someone else's tweet—maybe to answer a question, share some related information, or simply comment on what was said. To do this, simply place your mouse over the tweet and two icons will appear at the right. The @Reply icon is the bottom one (the star is to add the tweet to your Favorites page).

When you click the icon, you'll be taken back to the top of the page to enter your tweet. The @[USERNAME] will automatically have been added to the beginning of the post and the number of characters it takes up will be subtracted from your 140-character limit.

You can now write your tweet and send it as usual.

Another really important thing to remember is that, even though you're directing this response specifically to someone else, it is not a private message. It will appear on the timelines of everyone who follows you, in the Everyone list, and in search results. If you want a message to go solely to another person, that's what the next feature is for.

Direct Messages

A Direct Message (or DM) works like regular e-mail except you can only send it to one person at a time and you're still restricted to 140 characters.

To send a DM, simply click on the Direct Messages link in your right-hand nav bar and pick a name from the dropdown list of your followers.

A couple of notes about DMs:

• You can only send a DM to someone who follows you. Following someone else does not give you that authority.
• Unlike @Replies, the DM link in the right-hand nav bar lists how many messages are in there. However, it only tells you the total—not how many are new. However, this isn't really a problem because you can check an option on your Settings > Notices page to e-mail you whenever you receive a direct message. The default is On.

Retweets

A Retweet (or RT) is when you want to share something someone else has posted with your followers. This is a great way to interact with and expand your community of followers and followees. The key here is that you want to credit the original author of the tweet. Unfortunately, there's no nice little icon to do this for you, like with @Replies, but it's still pretty simple.

• Highlight the text of the tweet you want to share and press
  Ctrl + C to copy it.
• Go to the text box at the top of your page. Type in
  "RT @[USERNAME]" where that's the username of the person who wrote the tweet.
• Add a space and then press Ctrl + V to paste in the actual message.

For example, if you were going to retweet one of my (brilliant, incisive, fascinating... :) posts, it would look like this.

The one hitch you might run into is, if the original tweet was already close to the 140-character limit, when you add in the credit at the beginning, you'll go over the limit yourself. So you may have to do a little finagling to get it to fit. Just make sure you identify it as an RT and credit the author.

TinyURLs

One of the ways you can contribute to the Twitter community is by sharing links to other web pages that your followers may find interesting. However, most URLs are too long to use in Twitter without eating up too many of your 140 characters.

You may have noticed in my image of a retweet above, this URL: http://tinyurl.com/chfgq2. This is what's known as a TinyURL and, I have to say, this is one of those things that when you first hear about it, you go, "Man, that's a brilliant idea. Why didn't I think of it?!"

Basically, it's a service where you enter a long URL and it generates a much shorter one that, when you enter it in your browser, redirects you to the original page. I've used it in other places, like in e-mails where I don't want to have a long URL break up over several lines. And you can see how useful it is for Twitter.

Here are the steps to creating a TinyURL. (I'm going to use the URL from yesterday's post to demonstrate: http://www.techforluddites.com/2009/01/im-on-twitter-now-what.html.)

• On the page you want to link to, highlight the URL in your browser's location bar and press Ctrl + C to copy it.
• Go to www.tinyurl.com.
• Put your cursor in the text box where it says to enter a long URL and press Ctrl + V to paste yours in there.
  
• Click the Make TinyURL button. A page will come up that shows both the original and shortened URL. For example, my TinyURL is: http://tinyurl.com/bf3xat.
  
• Highlight the TinyURL on the web page and click Ctrl + C to copy it.
• Go to Twitter and enter your tweet and paste in the TinyURL wherever you need it.
  

When you submit the tweet, the URL will become live so people can click on it to directly go to the page.

Hint: If you're really desperate to cut a few more characters from your tweet, you can replace the "http://" from the URL with "www." and the link will still become live. For example, http://tinyurl.com/bf3xat = www.tinyurl.com/bf3xat.

Some people use other sites to generate tiny URLs and some Twitter-related applications have built-in engines to do it, but this is a good one to start with.

With the four methods listed above, you're now able to do at least 90% of what you're going to need to do on Twitter. Tomorrow, I'm going to be discussing an external application that helps you manage your tweets. Because once you really start using it, you might find it a bit overwhelming.

In the meantime, tweet away!

Posted in How To, Social Media, Twitter