Intermediate Twitter Tips

In addition to the strong response from the “When to use Twitter’s Block Function” article below, I’ve had a few interactions lately that indicate that some of the things I’ve learned from using Twitter the past few months could be of value to others. To that end I’ve started to compile a brief list of helpful tips that hopefully will make your use of the service more valuable:

1. Replies – Frequently you’ll receive a reply hours or days after you sent whatever message prompted that reply. It’s easy to completely forget what you said. The easiest way to check is to click on “in reply to” on their reply. Twitter will then display what prompted their response.
2. Retweets versus Replies – Some users who mean well will accidentally start a Retweet with their acknowledgment of the source. Their message ends up looking like this: “@jamesdickey RT Great news about X”. The problem with that is that if, as I do, most people have their Twitter settings set so that they are not copied on @replies, almost no one saw the message you were trying to spread! So, instead, make sure that anything you want seen by anyone other than @jamesdickey starts instead with any character other than an “@”.
3. Direct Messages – If you use the Direct Message interface on the Web, you can actually keep typing long past the time when the little counter says 0. You can confidently go until it says -115 according to the best information I’ve received (more in rare cases, but not worth using usually). So in a DM you have almost twice the capacity, especially because Twitter won’t even count the handle of the person you’re sending the message against your capacity!

Those are the tips that come to my mind immediately. What have you learned recently that you wish you knew earlier? Please share and help others – and quite probably, me as well.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.