Twitter: You Have an Account, Now What?

You've figured out how to tweet. You've found some people to follow. And maybe, if you are interesting, they'll follow you back.

How on Earth are you supposed to want to sit at your desk always refreshing your browser window to see the updated tweets?

It isn't fun. I went looking for some other solutions. And looking through the pages on Google, there are a lot of options.

This particular blog offers a great synopsis of several options of applications to choose from to better use Twitter.

I personally prefer Twhirl. A free downloadable app, it puts the tweets in a feeder form so that the most recent one is on top and as tweets come in, it automatically refreshes the feed. I have mine set to refresh every 30 seconds. It floats on my desktop instead of having a cumbersome browser window open. I also like that I can change the color scheme to separate out my direct messages, my @replies and my basic feed.



After exploring a bit more (there really aren't viable manuals for most of these things that I know of. You just click the button and hope for success!) I found that I could click on a Twitter ID and decide to follow (or remove) them, see their feeds, reply to them and some other handy buttons.

Another that I am poking around at is TweetDeck. Some may prefer the wider layout and the column style separations of @replies, tweets, and direct messages.



Frankly it gives me a headache.

For anything you might want to do, there is a way on Twitter. You just have to investigate.

For example, I didn't understand "hashtags" which look like this: #

What these do is allow twitter users to find others talking about a topic. They act like a search marker for twitter users. So, for example, if I wanted to talk to a group of twitter friends about my love of the movie "Legally Blonde," I could put a tweet up that looked like this:

WheatmarkBooks: Hey, anybody want to talk about #legallyblonde?

And anyone who wanted to would add the #legallyblond in their response. I could then search on search.twitter.com for people who have used that "hashtag" to follow the conversation.

The response might look like this:

@KatMeyer: ZOMG! I love #legallyblonde.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Twitter has a wide variety of uses that can go from simply reaching out to others, to defining entire "cults" as our author, Michael Druxman, put it.

Keep at it and if you have questions, you can DM me at Twitter ID WheatmarkBooks.

Why Authors Should Twitter

Lovely post by Mark Bertils of Index // MB's Minding the Gate touting the benefits of blogging for publishers. For all you authors out there, read the blog post substituting "author" for "book publisher." As Mark says, "Twitter is great at driving attention. The end."

As free technologies for conversing with the world about you, your book, and whatever else is on your mind go, Twitter can not be beat. You can find like-minded (or not) readers, writers, and thinkers, follow them - share your ideas and casually spread the word about your book while you're at it.

I'd say it's at least worth a try.

Happy Book Marketing!