Ignore the naysayers: Twitter is what you make it
There is seldom a shortage of people to tell you how banal or tedious Twitter is but, as any user will tell you, the social network is only as good as the people you follow.
This week, Louise Mensch MP has complained of threats from hackers because she suggested closing down Twitter in times of unrest, and cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew has spoken of the abuse he received from Indian fans during this summer’s Test series.
Meanwhile, police forces across the country have begun using Twitter to liaise better with the communities they serve, and even farmers are taking to Twitter to raise awareness of the problems of their industry, according to a recent survey.
Then, of course, there are the celebrities. Whether you’re a fan of Stephen Fry or Justin Bieber, it seems that every celeb is tweeting their thoughts and activities.
It's 2011 and, if you are on Twitter you could be forgiven for thinking that people should have got used to it by now. Certainly, Twitter users will be heartily sick of reading articles about what a social evil it is. Depending on who you read, Twitter is tedious, offensive, distracting or home to illiberal mobs. There is no shortage of people who are ready to dismiss Twitter without having taken the time to understand it.
However, Twitter is still relatively small and its users need to remember that the vast majority of people aren't on it. What follows, then, is for those people who are sceptical of Twitter or who just don't understand the point of it. I asked my Twitter followers to suggest the most common areas of misunderstanding for new users on the site. Below are some pointers based on the feedback I received.
What is it for?
So what is Twitter? A banal celebrity-filled trivia machine? A news-breaking current affairs forum? A lavatory wall filled with abusive graffiti? Or just a place to chat with friends? It can be all of those things. Twitter is just a platform. What it looks like depends very much on how you use it. If you know what you are doing, then it can be anything you like.
Twitter sceptics often complain that they have no interest in knowing what other people have had for breakfast. The short, snappy nature of Twitter means that it’s more often the target for this criticism than other social networks, such as Facebook or Google+. Twitter gives you just 140 characters per update. Critics believe that that is not enough space in which to share anything meaningful.
That’s a mistake. 140 characters is ideal for sharing a link to a good article or video. It’s enough space for a snappy one-liner or a short observation. And, crucially, it forces everyone to be concise. While not every tweet you see will be relevant, they will at least be brief.
How does it work?
Twitter depends entirely on who you ‘follow’. If you sign up, you can follow as many people as you like, without them having to follow you in return. Follow interesting people and you will receive interesting tweets. Follow argumentative people and you will see lots of arguments. And if someone is less interesting than you thought, you can unfollow them without hurting their feelings.
This asynchronous aspect of Twitter is at the heart of the confusion about the service. Sometimes it’s one-way and feels a lot like reading a series of news headlines. At other times, it’s a service for one-to-one conversations, like the telephone, or many-to-many conversations, as in a cafe. In fact, it’s all of those things at once.
‘I don’t have anything to say’
Still, for many people, the focus of Twitter is the box on the page that asks “What’s happening?”. They worry that they have nothing to say. That problem can be partly solved by considering who you are talking to. You often have something to say to your friends, for example. Another solution is to seek out people who share your interests. It’s a lot easier to find something to say about a topic you know a lot about.
However, Twitter isn’t reliant on you saying anything at all. Plenty of Twitter users hardly ever tweet or don’t tweet at all. They use it as a way to follow their interests.
Who to follow
You will have gathered by now that finding people to follow is important and finding the right people is vital. Almost every problem anyone has with Twitter is due to them not following the right people.
As a starting point, you can click the Who To Follow option at the top of the Twitter website. There you’ll find suggestions of people to follow based on what you’re interested in and tools for discovering whether your friends are on Twitter. As you add people, Twitter will make more suggestions based on who you are following.
How to use it
As you grow in confidence, you might find the Twitter website to be limiting. Twitter has an official desktop app that saves you having to regularly visit the website. There are third-party apps too, such as Tweetdeck, for more specialist users. Increasingly, as Twitter becomes more useful, you’ll want to check it on the move too. There are plenty of Twitter apps available for mobile phones.
A glossary
The other thing that came up when I asked about new users was confusion around the terminology. Here are five key terms to know:
Home timeline: the list of tweets from people you follow.
@reply: a public reply to another Twitter user, signified by an @ symbol ahead of their user name
Hashtag: a word or phrase preceded by the # symbol, collating tweets about the same topic. Eg. #facup could be used to follow FA Cup football.
Retweet: a tweet from another user, forwarded by someone you follow. Or a tweet from another user that you have forwarded to your followers. Marked by RT or the retweet symbol.
Direct messages: a private form of @ replies, DMs can be sent only to users who follow you.
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