8 Twitter Definitions For Beginners

There is no denying the extortionate rise in the use of social media over the last few years. So it’s no wonder we are using this now for our businesses. A free tool that can promote your business to a wide audience, who wouldn’t want to utilise this free tool! However you are now entering into a world of #hashtagging, selfies and TBT. Confused? Here are 8 definitions for one of the most used social media platforms for business, Twitter.

Let’s start with the basics! A tweet is a maximum of 140 characters. You can write a message, add photo’s, links and video’s. You can write Tweets to go straight on your Twitter feed and for your followers to see, or Tweet directly to someone you would like to speak to. Once you start tweeting you will learn quick that 140 characters doesn’t go a long way.. There are tools online, like Bitly.com that will shorten down links you may tweet, for example shortening your website URL.

The #hashtag started on Twitter and because of it’s popularity, spread to Facebook, Instagram, Google + and other social media sites! So what is a hash tag? The definition is a keyword preceded by the hash symbol (#). A hashtag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you type #Frozen (or #frozen, #FroZen, it’s not case-sensitive) into the Search Twitter box at the top of any Twitter page and hit Enter, you’ll get a list of tweets related to Frozen. The movie, weather etc. keep in mind you won’t get tweets that say “When is Frozen out” because “Frozen” isn’t preceded by the #hashtag.

Following on from the #hashtag, if a lot of people use the same #hashtag, for example on Valentine’s Day the hashtag #valentinesday was used in millions of tweets, so the #valentinesday started trending. It’s a hashtag that a lot of people are talking about and can easily be found. The top trending Tweets can be seen on the left hand side of your Twitter. Finding out what topics and #hashtags are trending is a great way to get your company noticed, getting more followers and more interaction. Try and find trending topics related to your business. For example if you are in the law industry, and a famous case if being televised and trending, join in the conversation! Don’t forget to put in the hashtag.

To put it simple, followers are people following your page. That’s it really! The follower can favourite, retweet and see all your tweets and your Twitter page. Following Twitter profiles allows you do to the same. It’s easy to get caught up in following lots of people to get follows back to get a high number of followers, but as a business remember to add local businesses or businesses you would like to work with to really make Twitter effective for your company. When you follow someone following you, you can also DM each other.

DM stands for ‘Direct Message’. This is where you can send a message to a follower privately that will not show up on your Twitter feed. This is good for sharing personal details like a contact number, address, meeting arrangements etc. You are still limited to 140 characters. Separate the followers you want to interact with, work with, potential clients etc. into different lists so they are easier to find when needing to DM a follower.

This is the best way to interact with your followers. If you have over 2000 followers, looking at the newsfeed to see Tweets to interact with can be very time consuming. Using a list can put your followers into categories. Some examples can be local businesses, followers that give you idea’s, competitors etc. this makes it a lot simpler to interact with potential clients or see what the competition is up to.

Retweeting a tweet. If you like a followers post, maybe it’s relevant to your industry, you or your business has been mentioned, or think your followers would like it, pressing retweet will repost the Tweet on your profile, like you would forward an e-mail. Sharing someone else’s tweet to your followers.

Next to the Retweet button is a star. This is the favourite button, which favourites a Tweet! This shows the user that you have liked a Tweet. Once you have favourited a Tweet it goes into a list of favourites, so a lot of businesses use favouriting almost like a book mark. Maybe they have posted and retweeted a lot of tweets that day so saving that tweet for another day. Favouriting a tweet can also be a way to get new followers, the user will get a notification that you have favourited a tweet, which will get you business Twitter noticed. Still favourite relevant or interesting posts and not just any post. Favouriting a tweet is also polite if not able to reply to every interaction.

For help with your social media click here to go get in touch about how Smile Design and Print can help you!