Monday, May 3, 2010

Twitter for Beginners - Part Three

Sorry for the delay, but here we go... part three. At the end of part two I said that this was going to "cover tweeting photos, short URLs, Retweets, searches and I will tell you why people do want to know what you had for lunch..." so that is what I am going to do over part three, and part four.

The nice thing about Tweetdeck, I can't promise the other Twitter clients do all the same things, is that it makes Tweeting photos, shortening URLs, Retweeting and searches easy as pie.

First things first, photos. There are lots of different sites which will store your pics and publish them to twitter, I use yfrog but there is also twitpic and tweetphoto, (take your pic - ha ha ha) which allows you to take photos on via phone and upload them or upload straight from a laptop. Within Tweetdeck you can simply drag and drop the pic into the 'compose update' field and within the settings function you can choose which pic client you want to use, after that, it's all automatic.
So the above is a picture that I took today whilst walking up Queen Street, I think the window is going to look great, but I will be interested to see how many of the post it notes last the night...

So I twittered the picture, and one of the people that followed me decided that they wanted to share the picture too, so they Retweeted it (RT). In this instance they commented before they retweeted my tweet:
Twitterers have the option to comment on what they are retweeting or directly retweet it as per:The above is what I see in the web version when someone automatically RT's my tweet. In tweetdeck it looks something like:
However this will not come through in my mentions - which means to find out who has retweeted without editing, you do need to use the web version - unless someone else can shed light on this for me??

Retweeting is a nice way to share information which you find interesting with the people that follow you. Similarly, if your followers find your information interesting, they will share it. If for some reason you want people to retweet you - for example you write a blog, or are using Twitter on behalf of a company and want the information to reach further than just your followers - for the LOVE of all things good please work out how many characters 'RT +@(your)username' takes up and make sure that when you compose that tweet, anyone who wants to RT it doesn't have edit it down before they do so - you gotta make it easy for them.

In Tweetdeck, if you want to RT something - click on the forward direction arrow when you mouse over the users avatar.

If you are including a link but the URL is super dooper long, there is a way around that as well. Tweetdeck again, being the clever little client that it is, automatically shortens your URL for you (but also gives you the option to unshorten it if you want the URL specifically). However, if for some reason you are using the web to tweet and need to get that URL down, then use bit.ly or tinyurl.com to help you shorten that URL. For example, the URL to my blog post for Part Two was super long, but bit.ly shortens it right down:
LOTS of characters to not nearly as many characters. Awesome times.

OK, I think that is enough for one blog post. We're so close... there is just search to go.

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