A Guide To Twitter

Two friends recently asked me about twitter. They wanted to know how it works and what's so much interesting in it, as they thought Twitter is damn boring. There are loads of people who created an account and later abandoned it forever because they didn't understand how stuff works on Twitter.
Of course, I too am one such person who abandoned Twitter account after some failed attempts to figure it out. I created an account about 5 years ago. Some 5 friends in my email contacts had accounts then, but none of them were active and I followed some other celebrities who were not very active on twitter. So it was very boring, and I left. Actually I forgot about twitter.
If there was someone who had explained how Twitter works, maybe... who knows... I could have been a Twitter  celebrity by now :D ;)
Two weeks back, a friend asked to explain twitter in rather simple words. And I sent him the description below in Facebook chat. It's according to his suggestion that I'm posting it on the blog.

Twitter is many things. It is a medium to get direct updates from celebrities/organizations/companies, marketing, publicity, live news etc. But believe me, Boring is not one of them.


For commoners, twitter is mainly about getting updates from important people (celebrities) or organizations that interest us.
For example, Amitabh Bachchan, Greenpeace, Lady Gaga, Nokia, Obama, Sachin Tendulkar, Shashi Tharoor etc.
And for these people, twitter is a media for sharing their latest news, products etc.

Dana Delany's
verified account

Most of the celebs either have personal account or official account. Some of these are Verified accounts, i.e., their authenticity is verified by Twitter (they'll have blue badge with white tick in their profile). The verified account of Dana Delany, my favorite actress, is given here.

HOME

Twitter Homepage

A comparison of Twitter to Facebook is used wherever possible, to make things easier.

Feed: What you’ll find in the main box under "Tweets". Here you'll get the tweets posted/retweeted by people you follow. It’s similar to Facebook Home where the status/photo updates of friends or pages you liked appear in timeline.

The topmost box on your left sidebar gives your profile summary.

Tweets: It’s like the status/photo update on Facebook. Click on the space written “Compose new tweet” and type your update in 140 characters or less. You can also upload photo and add location to the tweets. Click on “Tweet” button below it and it’s posted in your timeline/profile.
Note- A full stop or comma or space counts as one character.

Following: No. of people you have subscribed for updates. Clicking on that button takes you to the list of people you follow.

Followers: No. Of people who are following your tweets. By clicking on it you’ll find the people who are following you.

The second box on sidebar is Twitter's suggestions of people you might like to follow, people of similar interests etc.

The third box shows the current trends.

Trends: Something is "Trending" means that topic is most tweeted about at that moment. Trends can be set according to your interests. You can change your trends to either International (most tweeted internationally) or a specific country. Twitter also provides an option of "Tailored trends" where they create a personalized trend for us based on our interests, the people we follow etc.
licking on a trend takes you to a page showing tweets containing that trend.

Hashtag: It's tagging of words or phrases and makes searching easier. You just have to add a hash  symbol before the word/phrase. When you click on the hashtag, twitter presents a list of tweets that have the same hashtag. E.g. #Twitter, #ThatAwkwardMoment, #IndVsPak.

CONNECT

Connect page

This page shows all your connections. Under "Interactions" you'll find

1. Tweets of other people that are mentioned to you.
2. Replies to your tweets.
3. New followers.
4. Your tweets that were retweeted by other people.
5. Your tweets that were favorited by other people.

Under "Mentions" you'll find only the first two.

Handle/Username: You cannot have a Twitter account without first creating a handle. Each one should have a unique handle. You can use english alphabets, numbers and underscores for your handle. Every handle starts with '@' symbol. My handle is aNUbOMB. If you type @anubomb in any tweet, it 
gets mentioned to me and appears in my Connect page. It is similar to taggging people on Facebook.You can mention more than one people in a tweet.
E.g. If you type 

@shreyaghoshal @DanaDelany @RieSinclair @thesushmitasen @arrahman @wwfindia Hello

all these people will see that tweet in their connections. They can reply, retweet, favorite and view the whole conversation using the option under each tweet.

Conversations

View /Hide Conversation: Clicking on this shows/hides the entire conversation related to this particular tweets. The original tweet, the replies to this tweet by other people etc., as given in the example.

Retweet (RT): Retweeting a tweet means that you are including it in your timeline so the people who follow you can see that tweet. It's like Share in Facebook and giving publicity.

Favorite: This is somewhat similar to Like in Facebook. People can view your favorite tweets from your profile.

DISCOVER

Here you can find trending tweets, activities of people you follow, suggestions for who to follow, option to import contacts and to browse different categories of interest.

ME

This is where you can view your profile.

Profile

Direct Message (DM): This service is used to send private messages to the people who follow. They can reply to it only if you are following them back. These don't appear in your timeline either, just like Facebook messages.

In another person's profile, instead of the DM button you'll find FOLLOW button. If you click on it, it will turn to "FOLLOWING" and you'll get their tweets in your feeds. Click on it again to unfollow people.
The blue icon with a quill, on the top right of the window, is used to compose a tweet.
To the right of it (not shown in the photo above) there's another button that collapses/hides all the conversations viewed.



Follow Friday (#FF): It's a common practice in Twitter to suggest other users worth following, on fridays.

Now Playing (#NP or #nowplaying):  It is a very common trend on twitter to tweet the song that you are playing at the moment. 

#NP Where You Are by @RieSinclair

 
Hope that covers more than the basics of twitter. Do share your queries and suggestions on this post, in the comment section below.

If you are interested, you can read more such posts in "My Experiments With Twitter" series.

1^st part of this post was about the advantages and disadvantages of Twitter. Those who would like to go through it, please follow this link:

 My Experiments With Twitter Part 1 

2^nd part describes my reasons for joining twitter and how one can identify Twitter addiction. It can be viewed at:

My Experiments With Twitter Part 2

3^rdpart of it covers some of the celebrity replies/retweets/favorites I've received on twitter. In order to compile this particular post, I have put up a lot of effort. Hope you'll find it interesting:

My Experiments With Twitter Part 3

  
And have a great time in Twitter.
SOLDIER OOOONNN!!!!!! :)