First things first: This article is not meant to help you get more followers so that you can market your products/services. If that is what you are looking for, I suggest you not waste your time reading this article. Instead go listen to Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Jason Calacanis (and many others) who are using twitter as a product/service marketing tool.

OK, now that the ‘disclaimer’ is done; Twitter is a wonderful thing. Let’s start there. You may have heard about it, seen your friend or colleague using it, or seen a few celebrities talking about it. May be you already have an account, but not sure what to do with it. No matter which of those cases may be (or something that I missed!), by the end of this article, you’ll be well on your way to utilizing twitter to your benefit. I have tried to arrange this post as a chronological Q&A of a sort so that you can track your progress and have something to forward others. If all goes well, it shouldn’t take you more than 30 minutes to fall in love with twitter. So, let’s get started.

Pre-req for this tutorial: A Twitter account. You can sign-up for one if you don’t have one already. If you are signing up right now, I suggest NOT following anyone from the “Suggested Users” list that shows up right after sign-up. I think it’s pointless. From here on, I’ll assume that you have a twitter account, and are logged in it right now. I’ll be using my account (@divyamistry) as an example for this guide. Here’s what  you’ll learn by the end of this:

• What twitter is
• How to send a message
• How to follow a person 
• How to find people to follow (Detailed response with a post coming next week!)
• How to send replies to a user to get conversation going

Question #0

You ask: What is twitter?
I say: Twitter is a microblogging platform. Each of your microblog post is called a “tweet” in twitterverse. I like to explain Twitter this way: think of twitter & your tweets as a cell-phone & sms (aka ‘texts’) service. The difference is that anyone who wants to read your messages can do so over the internet. Of course, you can send messages directed at someone so that only the recepient sees it (twitter calls it a direct message), or send a response to someone’s message so that everyone can see it (twitter calls it a reply). What does this mean for you as an end-user? This means that you probably don’t want to give out your SSN or personal phone number on twitter. If it’s on twitter, it’ll become public knowledge sooner or later. So choose your words wisely. Mocking your boss is probably not a good idea (a sad but true tale). Praising your boss rightly; however, is OK and it may even help you!

Question #1

OK, I’m on my Twitter home, what do I do now?
Good question. Let’s start by familiarizing with what you are seeing on screen:

You type your message (140 characters or less) in the message box, and hit {Update} button to send out the tweet. Just like you, there are millions of users tweeting on twitter. You can choose a few users (or a few thousand!) whose tweets you would like to follow. Once you follow someone, their tweets appear in your timeline. You may follow people you know personally, or don’t know them at all but simply find their tweets interesting. For example, I am following my brother (@dmistry) as well as a user called tinybudda who tweets quotes of wisdom every day! In other words, you follow who you find interesting, and those who find you interesting will follow you.

OK, time for some hands-on work. Let’s send our first tweet! Type “I just joined Twitter! Familiarizing myself with the UI.” in message box and click on {Update}.

You should see your tweet appear in your timeline right away.

Super! Now you know how to tweet on twitter. May be later in the day you’ll be going to grocery store. You can tweet “Off to Safeway to get some mango ice-cream.” And later in the week, may be when you are attending a stand-up you can tweet “Can’t wait to watch Seinfeld live this weekend!” You get the point. These are the basic tweets that most people send out. Of course, there are more interesting tweets you can send out if these aren’t ‘cool’ enough. Keep reading ;)

Question #2

OK, now I know how to tweet. What next? My twitter page is utterly empty and boring :-/
Good point and glad you brought it up. You can definitely fill up your page with your own tweets, but that wouldn’t be too interesting, now would it? So, let’s find people to follow. These can be your friends and/or users who share similar interests with you.

Let’s start with finding me on twitter. Click on “Find People” link at the very top of the page. You can find users by their names, usernames or email ids from your address book. To add me, type divyamistry for username and click on {Search}. Click on my name/icon. You should see my timeline and right below my icon, a button to {Follow} me. Click on the button.

Once the button changes to {Following}, go to your Twitter home. Now you should see my tweets in your timeline. If you are a fan of Nine Inch Nails, you can search for trent reznor in twitter, and one of the results should be the real Trent Reznor. Click on {Follow} to get Trent Reznor’s updates in your timeline. If you want to see if anyone you personally know is already on twitter, click on “Fine People” link at the top of page and click on “Find on other networks” tab. Here, provide details of your address book. Twitter will compare your address book entries with its database and let you know if anyone from your address book is already on twitter. You may have one, two, or twenty or more of your contacts on twitter. Add everyone you would like to follow. Once you ask twitter to add your friends to your ‘follow’ list, twitter will ask you if you want to invite rest of your address book contacts, who are not on twitter, to twitter. Please do me a favor and {Skip} that step. Don’t harass people like that. It’s annoying and rude. Once you’re well versed in twitter, personally invite them so that you can help them get started and create a meaningful conversation throughout their stay.

By now either you have 8-10 people in your ‘following’ list (i.e. the list of users you would like to follow and have messages appear in your timeline) OR you only have me and Trent Reznor showing up in your timeline! If you don’t have a few folks in your following list, don’t worry; next step (Step#3) will give you a jump start on this as well! If you are following a handful of people by now, may be you want to wait a couple of days to get used to that level of activity on your page. Reply to your friends’ messages. Share links of news/videos/pics with them. More on replying and direct-messaging users in Step#4.

Question #3

Cool. So, now my page has @divyamistry and a couple of (or none of) my friends. Unfortunately, none of the people I’m following right now are into drinking tea. I really want to meet people who are into the world of Tea. How do I find people with common interest?

EXCELLENT, EXCELLENT question. Back in the day you would have to scour various blogs and websites to figure out who is into your area of interest. A few weeks ago, Kevin Rose & company created an unofficial twitter directory called WeFollow. Go to http://wefollow.com Scroll down a little bit to find “Search by tag” search box. Type your interest there, e.g. tea, and click on {Go}. The result you see is of the users who identify themselves with tea. Similarly, if you are interested in hollywood news, search for wefollow tag hollywood. Add a few folks that seem interesting.

Question #4

Nice! My twitter page is filled with all the folks i’d like to get message from. (This is awesome!) But there’s a problem now. I see messages from others and I can write my messages, but how do I reply to someone’s message? I want to let them know that they are cool for noticing something. I think that’ll be a good way to start a conversation and make twitter more interesting!

You’re absolutely right! It’s twitter’s ability to send and track replies is what makes it such a wonderful tool to start public conversations. If you want to reply to any of the messages in your timeline, hover over the message you’d like to reply to and click on the curved-arrow button that appears on the right. Now type your message in message box next to the @username. Remember that this is a public reply. Everyone on the internet, including the recepient, will see this. If you want to send a direct message to a user, go to their twitter page and click on “message username” link under Actions section. (Do note that you’ll only be able to send a direct message to those who are following you.)

So, let’s send our first reply! You should see a few of my messages in your timeline. Find the one that you find interesting/stupid/awesome/pointless/whatever and hover your mouse over that message. You should see two buttons show-up next to my message. One is a star, the other a curved arrow. Click on that curved arrow. Your message box should now have @divyamistry filled in. If you don’t want to reply to any of my current messages but simply want to send a message aimed at me, manually type @divyamistry your message in message box (click here if you’d like to see this done for you!). Type whatever you would like to type (keeping in mind that everyone gets to read it!) and hit {Reply} button.

If anyone sends you an @-reply, it’ll show up in your @Replies page.

Question#5

So I can actually send messages to Trent Reznor now? Sweet! Let me ask him if he has seen the demo tape I sent last month.

That’s right! You can send @ replies to anyone on twitter and they’ll see the messages in their @Replies area. Important thing to keep in mind is that if you send an @-reply to any popular folks (celebrities, politicians, etc.) you may or may not get a reply from them. You have to imagine that over 100,000 people are following them and sending them @-replies. However, if you send @-replies to a friend or someone who has may be less than a few hundred followers, they’ll likely read your reply and send you a reply back. This is not to say that the celebrities or popular people don’t reply at all. Gary Vaynerchuk and Veronica Belmont are quite popular and pretty high-profile people in my circle of interest, and I have received responses from them. Just know that they have friends, collegues, and other people they’d like to talk to as well. Think of conversations on twitter as being at a huge party. If someone is surrounded by a lot of people, it’ll be hard to have a meaningful conversation with them unless you know them personally. However, if you see two-three people talking about something you’re interested in, you may be able to strike a chord with them and may be find some helpful contacts to network with. Besides, no matter what I say or anyone else says, always remember that if you have something valuable and interesting to offer, there are people (including the big-shots) who’d like to hear you. OK, enough on that. Moving on.

Question #6

Divya, you’ve been quite helpful. But I’m getting tired of reading this. It’s freaking long, I got other things to do, and besides, your 30-minutes are just about done!

Well, thank you. Always willing to help :) If there’s anything else I can help with, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me. Now you know where to find me ;) I am not sure if you have fallen in love with twitter yet, but I had to say that in the beginning of the article to make you read the whole thing. There’s a lot more to do on twitter, but I think this should give you a good start. If you want to get into some more “advanced” stuff, search around for twitter hash tags (written as #tag); third-party apps like TweetDeck and Twhirl, embedding pics with twitpic.com, using http://search.twitter.com, and Twitter Search Operators. Twitter search is actually quite powerful. You can search for tweets coming from a certain location, or ones that have a positive/negative attitude, or are asking questions! As you can see, there’s plenty more to talk about. @divyamistry me if you want to know more or have any questions. And let me welcome you once again to Twitterverse!

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Send me your comments about this post through twitter. I’ll try to put disqus comments rolling as soon as I can, but meanwhile twitter is the best option. In the next installment, I’ll expand on Question #3 (How to find the right people to follow so that you can have meaningful relationship within the twitterverse). The post should be up next week.