This is the corresponding blog post to go with my session at PodCamp London 2009, Twitter for Newbies.Getting StartedFirst, you can create your account at https://twitter.com/signup. Enter your full name and your desired username. I recommend that if you are creating a personal account that you set your username to be your real name, this makes it easier for your friends to find you later. For example, my name is “Will Spaetzel”, so I chose the username, “spaetzel”.Find Your FriendsOnce you have signed up, you’ll be logged in automatically and taken to a page that lets you see if people you have in your address book are already on Twitter. You can import your address book from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Hotmail or MSN. Just click on the appropriate logo and enter your login information and click continue.Twitter will then go through all of your e-mail contacts and find people who already are on Twitter that you have in your address book. You can select or unselect as many of the matches as you would like and click “Continue” the matching people will then be added to your Twitter followers.<p style="text-align: center;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">Next, Twitter will ask if you want to invite the rest of your address book, I recommend that you just skip this step as inviting them all is likely to be annoying to your contacts. I’d also skip the step after this where Twitter recommends a number of famous users. Twitter is for conversations, and these famous people likely won’t read what you write or bother to write back to you.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Upload a Picture</p><p style="text-align: left;">Twitter gives everyone the same default profile picture. Obviously, if everyone is the same, why would people be interested in you? So upload a profile picture and stand out. To do this, click “Settings” in the top right and then click “Picture”. Click “Browse…” and find and double click picture of yourself on your hard drive. Then click “Save”. Twitter will upload the picture and set it as your default.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Send your First Tweet</p><p style="text-align: left;">Click the Twitter logo on the top-left to go back to the Twitter home page. Under “What are you doing?” type in anything that you want to share with the world. It can be a cool link that you’ve found, your thoughts on the current news or how much you are enjoying reading this article. It doesn’t matter. Just type and click “Update”. Your friends will all see your Tweet (Twitter message) on their Twitter home pages.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Replies</p><p style="text-align: left;">If you find a tweet that you have something to say back to, hover over the tweet and click the curved arrow that appears on the right of the Tweet. This will take you back to the input box with @username filled in. This is how you reply to someone publicly, just type @ followed by their username. After the username include a space and then what you want to say back to the twitter user. They will see your reply on their Twitter replies page.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Direct Messaging</p><p style="text-align: left;">If you want to send soneone a private message that the rest of Twitter to see, you can type “d username” where username is the Twitter name of the person you wish to message. Make sure that you include a space between the “d” and the username. Just as with replies, include a space after the username and then type your message. Once you click “send” the user will get an e-mail containing your private message.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Privacy</p><p style="text-align: left;">You can set up your account to hide your messages from anyone whom you haven’t granted permission to see. Just click “Settings” in the top right, scroll down and check th e”Protect my updates” box and click “Save”. When you set your profile as private you will be e-mailed whenever someone requests to see your profile and only once you grant them permission will they be able to read your Tweets.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I recommend that you keep your Twitter profile public. This allows people to find your profile though Google and other means. With a private profile, far fewer people will find you on Twitter, reducing the number of great conversations that you can have there.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Twitter Applications</p><div class="zemanta-img" style="margin: 1em; display: block;"><div><dl class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 200px;"> <dt class="wp-caption-dt">
</dt> <dd class="wp-caption-dd zemanta-img-attribution" style="font-size: 0.8em;">Image via CrunchBase</dd> </dl></div></div>It is even easier to keep up with Twitter if you use a Twitter desktop application. For new users I recommend Twhirl, It is easy to use, just enter your Twitter username and Password. The app will then show all of the Tweets from the people you follow and notify you of replies or direct messages sent to you. The app means that you’ll be able to see updates from your friends right away rather than manually checking Twitter.com.Closing CommentsRemember, that Twitter is a place for conversation. Post Tweets that other people will be interested in. Don’t just use Twitter to broadcast news, engage your followers. And reply to the Tweets from the people you follow. Twitter is most valuable when converations happen between your Twitter community.This post is just an introduction to Twitter, I hope that this advice will help you to get up and running on Twitter quickly; and that you will be able to get a lot out the site right away. I have more ideas about best practices for Twitter and hope to post some of them in the future.Update: My friend, Carolyn Marshall has put a great post on “Why Twitter?”.