This month is going to be filled with social media and blog tips. I’ve decided to try to make my blog a better place and in turn want to share my tips with you! I recently decided to dive into Twitter. There is only one problem – I have no idea what I’m doing! Therefore I decided there has to be quite a few others that don’t know either. What the heck is ‘RT’ and when do I use the ‘@’? How to people shorten the URL’s?? Oh help!! I’ve scrounged high and low for some Twitter Tips to help us all! This post has tips that are helpful for newbies and oldies! Get started by creating your account (if you haven’t already!). According to THIS article, ‘40 Tried and Tested Twitter Tips…’ by Shea Bennett, ‘Use a photo of YOU as your avatar. Not a celebrity, not your pet, not your baby and not your partner. You. That’s who we came to see. And we don’t want a close-up of your eye, either. Also, your picture should get bigger when we click on it. Trust me: you’re a lot better looking than you think.’ I’m going to use this picture… 
As for your tweets…They can only be 140 characters long. I often have a lot to say or links I want to include so what do I do?
- Use https://bitly.com/ to shorten your urls… which will take up less characters!
- Try to reword what you want to say so you are not using a bunch of shortened expressions that don’t make sense.
- Make sure you are using proper spelling and grammar. Nobody likes to read misspelled words all day long. (Real story – I had to ‘unfriend’ a girl from High School because every time she posted a new status it had at least TWO misspelled words and I just couldn’t take it anymore! Is that wrong of me?)
- Be yourself!!
Image from twitbackgroundimages.com Followers- Within 24 hours of creating my account I had two notifications of new followers. I had not updated my account settings, set an avatar, or told anyone about my account. Sometimes we get lucky enough to have people find us. Most of the time we have to do a little work!
- For my blog friends you can put a twitter icon that links to your account on your blog sidebar. I’m sure you have seen them!
- You can also share your account on other platforms by using your URL. For example my user name is @poofycheeksblog, so my twitter URL is http://www.twitter.com/poofycheeksblog – make sense?
- The Twitter Help Center says to make sure you appear in search – ‘In order for your account to appear in search results, make sure your username, full name, and bio are all filled out and contain key words that you would like to be associated with your Twitter account.’
- The Twitter Help Center also says, ‘It is also important to tweet, retweet, and mention regularly to gain resonance amongst your followers so that search results are up to date.’
Image from bleedingcool.com The Lingo! Here is some of the lingo decoded-
- ‘@’ is used before a username. It directs your tweet toward that person or can be used to mention/respond to them in your tweet. (Sort of like tagging on FB)
- ‘#’ before a word makes it into a topic. You can group your tweets by that keyword.
- ‘RT’ means retweet! Who knew?
Enjoy! 