A while ago, I wrote a Twitter Quickstart Guide.

It’s a little out of date now and it’s a sort of Aston Martin quickstart. It’s a bit elegant and roomy. I realise that many people would prefer a Caterham-style guide, with no fluff and plenty of vroom.

So the first section of this post will get you up and running in a few seconds.

Just do it. Right here, right now.

If you decide you don’t want to use Twitter, you’ve lost less time than you spend deciding whether to have a Bourbon or a digestive.

So, right click (or command-click) >>>>here<<<< and open the link in a new pane so you can keep reading my helpful advice while you begin your Twitter journey. I’m going to assume you’ll do that every time I ask you to click on something, because otherwise you’re going to spend a lot of time re-opening this page…

Okay, if you’re dithering about your screen name, stop. You can change it later if you want to. In the meantime, if you’re in doubt, may I suggest you prefix your own first name with something. Be MassmarketBob or LiteraryLinda, or go with something goofier like KnittingJenny.

You’ve signed up? Great. Good work. Now click here or type twitter.com/harkaway into your browser. Click the button to follow me, then go to the lists (right hand side of the page) and click ‘view all’, then select the Book Trade list. Or you can be lazy and click here. Follow the list. There are at present just over 300 people on it, and you probably know some of them. Click on their names and follow a few of them. Now click here and follow some of the nice people on the Bookseller lists. You know you want to. And then you may as well let the Bookseller know you’re now on Twitter, too. [N.B. Recently I have noticed that people who do no, in fact, work in the book trade have been using this guide. Since I follow a wide and ridiculous cross-section of the world, you can skip the Booktrade list and the Booktrade II list and look at some of the others for inspiration. Or follow a bunch of writers and publishers and agents if you want, it's a free country...]

See? You’re done. What’s going to happen now is this: your own Twitter feed is going to show a bunch of people you know talking about things you know about. If you look on the right of your own page, you’ll find my Book Trade list. You can read that, too. Don’t hang around. You can break your duck by sending me a message, if you want: go to the input box and type:

@Harkaway Hi! I signed up. My technophobia is melting even as we speak. I am swimming the cloud! Yay, me!

In case you’re wondering, you can say quite a lot in the allotted space. For example:

This message is long & unwieldy – a little contrived, even – but it serves a purpose. It is precisely one hundred and forty characters long.

Now, here’s the second bit of the guide, which I have culled from two previous posts on this topic I wrote on this site. If you’re curious, try searching in the box in the top right for “quickstart” – you should get the original post and another called “you have to be there” which is the presentation I did for the London Book Fair a while ago.

1. Twitter is NOT a broadcast medium.

The word ‘microblog’ suggests that it’s about minuting your day. “I’m brushing my teeth.” “I’ve dropped the soap.”

Please. Don’t go there. Twitter is a conversation, a rolling babble of ideas, alarm, comment. At the risk of sounding like a lunatic: Twitter is the zeitgeist in 140 character fragments. Some of it is trivial, some of it is not, but it’s unlikely that anyone will want to know about the soap situation.

More than that, though, tweets which are basically plugs for product, or references to another site, will probably fall flat. Twitter is above all about relationships and communication. It is a multidirectional flow of information and opinion. Respect that, enjoy it, and you’ll be fine. Ignore it, and Twitter will probably return the favour. You need to get to know people, respond to them. Don’t worry, they’ll respond to you, too. But this is a level playing field. It’s not like putting stuff on a billboard or advertising on TV. It’s like going to lunch with a lot of people you’ve never met before in a very nice, chatty pub.

2. Hashtags

You’ll see tweets like this:

Cameron & Clegg: marvellous. Now I can hate all three parties in #UKpolitics.

That # is a signal for Twitter; it lets the system know there’s a tag there. Click the word with the tag, you’ll get taken through to a search for all uses of it. You can see what else people are saying on that topic. The search will also find uses which are not tagged. NB you can’t use punctuation or spaces in a tag. So #michelle’s wedding will find all instances of “michelle”. The rest of the term is inert. On the other hand, you can tag something with #michelleswedding and that will work so long as everyone else uses the same tag. Anyone can make up a tag.

3. Apps & Phones

In the end, to get the most out of Twitter, you need to be using it from a smartphone as well as from your desk. The immediacy of it, and the sense of participation, is part of the thing itself. And also, you want to be able to use the backchannel which is Twitter to find out and share stuff on the go. The London Book Fair is a different animal with Twitter. So is an evening on the town. If you’ve got this far, you won’t find it hard to get hold of an app for iPhone, Blackberry, or Android to make that happen. I use Twittelator, for no better reason than that this really cool guy told me to and I’ve never found a reason to change.

Similarly, Twitter apps for your desktop can make the whole experience a bit more powerful. I use TweetDeck, but there are plenty. And of course, the best place to get advice on either of these is… Twitter. You’ve probably got used to Googling things. It’s entirely possible that many of those things you can now ask your group on Twitter instead. Google certainly thinks so; they’ve been chasing live search for months, lest they lose out…

And that’s about it for getting started. The key thing is to follow people who are interesting, pass on interesting information and links, and remember that Twitter is democratic and populist. It doesn’t respond to instructions, but it will walk across coals for something intriguing.

Not that you have to be intriguing all the time. Just be you – not your job or your sales targets. It’s a long, slow party.

Come mingle.

[Edited 25th May 2011 for sense and so on. Not that I got all the errors and anachronisms. I'm sure I didn't. Life's rich and splendid that way.]