It’s all going to be okay…

If you were at the panel discussion I did yesterday and don’t know quite how to get started with this Twitter thingy, this post is for you. (It’s also for anyone else who wants to get into the warm, scented waters of Twitter, but hasn’t; or those who have signed up but are not yet fully addicted. You know who you are…)

I’m going to use myself (@Harkaway) as an example in the first instance, but actually you can use anyone who is already a Twitterer to start your journey. You’ll do slightly better if they have more than a hundred or so followers (I’ll define that word in a second) because you want some discussions to latch onto.

All right, here we go.

From the beginning…

Choose your Username. Don’t fret about it too much. Reckon on it being permanent, so think carefully about calling yourself @Rubbertyflubble if you want to be perceived as a very serious person.

___

Question: what’s this @ I keep seeing?

Answer: @ is the symbol Twitter uses to recognise usernames. If you write my name, Harkaway, in a tweet – yes, posts to Twitter are indeed referred to as tweets – the system will ignore it. But if you write @Harkaway, Twitter will display it as a clickable link which will take you through to my Twitter page.

___

Okay, so you’ve done that. You’re now signed up as @FearNoTwitter or whatever you decided. Now you’re looking at your Twitter page and thinking… er… it’s empty. 

You need to start following some people.

Following is Twitter’s basic activity.

Yes, really. Tweeting is important, too, because without it there would be nothing to read – but it’s like Argentine Tango. The real skill is to follow well – because anyone can talk, but listening is what makes you interesting. So…

Every time I tweet something, it goes into the list of things I’ve tweeted (well, yeah, I probably didn’t need to say that). If you want to have that list piped to you, you go to my Twitter page and click on the button which says ‘follow’. You can either find someone’s Twitter page by clicking on their name, or you can type it into the destination bar on your browser directly – http://twitter.com/Harkaway. (Twitter, being supersophisticated and 2.0ish, doesn’t need “www” at the start of its name. Don’t ask me why. It’s a thing.)

So now you’re following me. My feed looks something like this (each line is a separate tweet):

@LumbagoGod Seriously, I don’t agree. There are no cows that colour.

@DancerAndy Yes, I always knew what the ending would be. I played the whole book to that point.

Good grief, Twitter, ain’t you just peachy today? I’m hung over and you’re all shiny.

@Sorrowzy No, I do not have a Chinese publisher. Are you offering? :)

Oh, dear. Some idiot has set fire to my front gate again.

@MichaelaMork I love that movie. Summer Glau rocks.

@Pupperol #LIBF glad you liked the panel – stay in touch and let me know how it goes!

…. and so on.

Now, you may not be terribly interested in the cow discussion, but it’s possible that my dialogues with @Sorrowzy and @DancerAndy are relevant… although Twitter is partly about play, so maybe check out the silly stuff as well.

At the moment, though, you’re only getting my bits of the dialogue. There are a couple of things you can do. In general, you can see what @Sorrowzy and @DancerAndy are up to by clicking through to their pages and reading the feed. If you find they’re having conversations you want to be a part of, you can follow them, too. Some people consider it polite to say hello when they start following – you can either just type their name and then a short message – @Sorrowzy Hi, saw you’re talking Chinese publishing with @Harkaway, intrigued! – or you can pick an actual tweet to respond to. There’s a little arrow on the right hand side of the tweet which allows you to reply.

If you want the specific tweet I was responding to, though, the easiest thing to do is look at my tweet, and click on the bit – again in the right hand corner – which says in reply to. You’ll see the message I answered.

If you browse the various discussions taking place, you’ll trip over a few you’re interested by. Follow some people – you can always unfollow them later if they turn out to be shockingly dull.

Given the nature of the internet, and the fact that publishing is a pretty small world, you may find people you already know. Follow them, too. And remember that Twitter is basically a public discussion – if we didn’t want you to chip in with your opinion, we wouldn’t be having the conversation on Twitter.

So fine, now your incoming feed is a bit of a Babel, but that’s fine. You’ve thrown your cap into the ring by offering an opinion on the publishing deals in China. And by now, someone’s probably following you. He or she is reading all the things you tweet. You’re on your way. Just remember – 140 characters is the limit. More than that just vanishes off the face of the internet. There’s a little counter next to the box you type in, which tells you when you’re up against the wire.

@Replies

See on the right of the page there where it says ‘home’? Right underneath that it says your username. Click on that, and you’ll see any mentions of you (such as I was talking about this with @Harkaway, and he said…) and you can respond to them if you want. These used to be called @Replies but people use them to initiate contact, so that doesn’t really do them justice. If you’re already on Twitter and I don’t know about it, Drop me a line – Hey, @Harkaway, we met at #LBF and you had a ludicrous coat on. Hi!

Okay… that’s the white-belt class done. But you’re publicists. You’re authors and editors. You need more than just the basics. Behold, then… the budo of the intermediate Twitter user – which is where it gets clever.

Links…

Twitter doesn’t exist in isolation – there’s a whole internet out there. Naturally, people are going to discuss things and link to them in their tweets. Well, it’s easy. You can just type the URL – http://www.nickharkaway.com. Right? Well, yes, but. 

Look, it’s fine with short addresses. it’s not so good with something like http://www.reallylongURL.com/youhavetoseethis/files/stupidlycomplexalphanumerics. Because remember, there’s a 140 character limit. You’ve got no room left to say anything.

Fortunately, there are web pages to help you out – I use one at http://bit.ly. You go to bit.ly, put your link into the box and push the button, and it comes out with something like http://bit.ly/hblog. See? Much more economical.

@LumbagoGod Look, I wrote about this the other day. There are no naturally-occurring purple cows. http://bit.ly/hblog.

 

Hashtags…

Remember this?

@Pupperol #LIBF glad you liked the panel – stay in touch and let me know how it goes!

What’s that # doing there? Well, it’s letting Twitter know that LIBF is a topic of some sort. If you use the search box, you’ll find everything with that hashtag (that’s what signposts like #LIBF are called). Actually, it seems that I’m using the wrong one – everyone else is going with #LBF. You live and you learn…

Which makes another important point about hashtags – anything can be one. You can create one right now. I did it yesterday when I was stalking Canongate’s scary bunny. No one answered – probably because I didn’t add the #LBF tag at the same time. If I had, that tweet would have appeared in real time in front of anyone who was using hashtags to follow the Book Fair tweets. And they would have answered.

 

Twitter Applications…

So, the whole hashtag thing feels a bit cumbersome, and once you’ve got a few people, your Twitter page starts to look a bit mad, not to say congested, not to say incomprehensible. That’s fine up to a point – you don’t have to read every single tweet, you’re supposed to pluck a few out of the stream and carry on with life. Twitter isn’t a stern duty. It’s a babble. If it’s really important to someone that you see what they’re saying, use your username so it shows up in your @Replies – or they’ll email you!

All the same, a bit of order would be nice. That’s where Twitter applications (apps) come in. They’re separate programs which handle your Twitter. I use TweetDeck. There’s a link to them on the Twitter page. When it all gets a bit unwieldy, it’s probably a sign you need an app. 

The other nice thing about apps is that they recognise hashtags, and turn them into clickable links. No more search box…

 

Your Phone

If you have a smartphone, there are mobile apps which will let you use Twitter directly from it. You can also send text messages to Twitter, but you have to set that up from your Twitter page and authorise the phone in advance.

The thing is, all this prep sounds like a lot, but the end product is a Twitter experience which is hassle free and simple. Your equipment handles the technical side, and you get on with building a rapport with the world, which is what it’s all about.

 

And that’s where I’m going to stop.

There’s plenty more I could say, but you just have to get started and see where it takes you…

Let me know how it goes – on Twitter, preferably!