Twitter for Dummies (2 page)

Foreword

Let’s be honest: You’re not a dummy.

Technologies are often designed to guard against the seemingly errant desires and mistakes of the commons. What’s remarkable about this technology you intend to learn is its ability to immediately expose and evolve the true desires of the commons.

Although it may seem so, simple technologies like this don’t happen over night. What looks like a story of 1 to 3 years actually has a shadow of over 15 years of work, dumb mistakes, false starts, late-night frenetic insight, and patient distillation. Twitter is a life’s work built around three tenets: minimize thinking around communication, expose trends in local and global circles, and spark interaction. What you’re holding in your hands describes an essence of communication upon which millions will build their own value.

While not everything can be conveyed in under 140 characters, the essence of Twitter can: “Expect the unexpected. Whenever possible, be the unexpected.” I expect you to build something unexpected. Start small, start here.

Jack DorseyInventor, Founder, & Chairman, TwitterSan Francisco, California

Introduction

Have you heard? All the world’s a-twitter!

Twitter is a tool that you can use to send and receive short, 140-character messages from your friends, from the organizations you care about, from the businesses you frequent, from the publications you read, or from complete strangers who share (or don’t share) your interests.

As a user of Twitter, you choose whose updates you want to receive — which people you want to
follow.
In turn, other users can elect to follow
your
updates. You can send messages publicly for the entire Twitter community, semi-publicly to users whom you approve to receive your messages, or privately from one user to another. You can view these messages, called
updates
or
tweets,
either on the Internet or on your cellphone.

Twitter has changed and enhanced the way that people communicate with each other, with brands and companies, and with social movements and initiatives. Twitter has empowered users to raise money for people in need, coordinate rescue efforts in the wake of a natural disaster, and alert authorities to emergencies and illegal activities both domestic and abroad.

Skeptical of what you can say in 140 characters? The first paragraph of the Introduction weighs in at 41 characters. This paragraph? 137.

You may also find, over time, that you communicate more effectively and that your writing becomes shorter and more to the point. You can say a lot within very little space; and because it takes only a little time to read and update, you may be surprised about how much value you, your friends, and your family can extract from Twitter.

About This Book

We, the authors (Laura, Michael, and Leslie), aren’t employees, representatives, or shareholders in Twitter. The opinions that we give in this book represent what’s worked for us and our networks, but not necessarily the Twitter world at large. We’ve been on Twitter for quite a while, and we have a good sense about how people are using it. But Twitter is a living, breathing, and constantly changing dynamic community. Much of Twitter’s value comes from the ecosystem of tools built by others to work together with Twitter. Hundreds of these new tools launch every month. Twitter itself may change its feature set, its privacy features, or general direction overnight, which changes the way that people use it.

In fact, from the time we started writing this book to the time we’re completing it, about a dozen things have changed on the interface, including one complete layout overhaul. Although the layout and the exact location of everything may change around a bit, the basics of Twitter likely will always be the same. After you understand how the service works, you can pretty easily find any feature that may have moved since the publication of this book.
Note:
While things change, keep in touch with
@dummies
or our personal accounts
(@pistachio
,
@gruen
, and
@geechee_girl
) for the latest on our thoughts about Twitter. You can also keep up with the Twitter for Dummies community at
www.TwitterForDummies.org
.

We wrote this book to help more people understand, try out, and benefit from the incredible results and opportunities that can happen on Twitter. There’s been so much recent fuss over Twitter that you may think it’s just a fad. The truth is Twitter’s been changing lives for years now. Twitter can be fun, productive, supportive, and surprisingly powerful.

Just ask Laura. Before she “got” Twitter, she was practically homebound with two kids under two, trying to rebuild her personal and professional network in a whole new city. Twitter has been like a generous ocean. Treasured new friends, mentors, and incredible opportunities continually wash up on her beach. After 12 months of meeting incredible people and all her business leads, along with speaking at events all around the world, Laura finally took the hint and refocused her entire career on Twitter itself, to help others experience the benefits of mobile social networking. This year, her Christmas and birthday wish — to raise $25,000 for charity: water to build wells in developing nations — came true, you guessed it, because of Twitter.

Conventions Used in This Book

In this book, we stick to a few conventions to help with readability. Whenever you have to enter text, we show it in
bold
, so you can easily see it.
Monofont
text denotes an e-mail address or Web site URL. We capitalize the names of Twitter pages and features — such as Settings. Numbered lists guide you through tasks that you must complete in order, from top to bottom; you can read bulleted lists in any order you like (from top to bottom, bottom to top, or any other way).

Note:
Screenshots in this book show you what the interface was like in spring 2009, and significant changes took place four times during the writing of this book. If you ever run into Michael and he looks kind of nervous when you talk about the Twitter interface, it’s because he had to go back and change so many descriptions and screenshots over and over again. Give him a hug for us, please?

What You’re Not to Read

We wrote this book for the first-time Twitter users. If you’ve already created an account that has some friends and followers, you can probably skip the chapters that talk about how to sign up and get moving — but you might find it useful to review the sections on how to dress up your profile. If you’re a business and have already gotten rolling on Twitter, you can probably safely ignore many of the starting chapters and check out Parts III and IV. If you’re a Twitter pro and could have probably written this book, feel free not to read anything, use this book as a doorstop, and recycle it when you’re done. Okay, we’re kidding — it’ll make a great gift for the Twitter-skeptics in your life!

Foolish Assumptions

In this book, we make the following assumptions:

You’re at least 13 years of age. (You have to be at least 13 years old to have a Twitter account.)

You have access to a computer and the Internet (and know how to use them!).

You have a working e-mail address that you can access.

You have a mobile phone and know how to send text messages (if you want to access Twitter by using your mobile phone).

Bonus:
You have a smartphone (if you want to use a mobile Twitter application).

You can read.

How This Book Is Organized

Like other
For Dummies
books, each chapter in
Twitter For Dummies
is self-contained, and you can read them in any order you want. However, we’ve organized the book into four parts, and if you read them in order, you can get a strong understanding of the Twitter landscape, from signing up to tweeting like a pro.

Part I: Twitter? Like Birds Do?

Part I introduces you to the very basics of Twitter, from understanding how the Twitter feeds work to getting up and running with an account. You can figure out how to find and invite your friends to Twitter and start communicating with them in public and in private. We also look at the different things that you can do with the Twitter.com interface, including some things that may not be immediately obvious.

Part II: Joining Your Flock on Twitter

After you become familiar with the basics of Twitter, you probably want to know how to find the sorts of people you want to follow and how you can start communicating with them in a way that makes sense on the medium. We give you all that information in this part, and we provide a list of many resources that you may find useful in getting Twitter to work best for you.

Part III: Twittering in High Gear

Part III goes in depth into all the ways that you can interact with the Twitter interface, from desktop clients to mobile phone tricks to short-hand commands that can drastically improve the efficiency and information that you can get from Twitter. We also go over third-party solutions, search tools, and other content discovery tools and metrics that you may want to try.

Part IV: Knowing Why We Twitter

In Part IV, we ask you to ask the big questions about why you’d want to use Twitter and what sort of presence you might want to cultivate. We go through the different ways in which people, businesses, not-for-profits, and other organizations can use Twitter. We also provide case studies and examples for how brands and organizational presences have benefited other users on Twitter and themselves, and how they’ve successfully used Twitter to improve their brands’ transparency and customer relations. Lastly, we show how Twitter has started to effect social change and how grassroots efforts by users have helped raise money, expose news, and even elect presidents.

Part V: The Part of Tens

The final section is typical of every
For Dummies
book. In these chapters, we provide you with highlights of our ten favorite Twitter tools, ten favorite ways to use Twitter, and even some other applications that have the same or similar functionality as Twitter that you can check out.

Icons Used in This Book

Icons in this book point out important tidbits for you to look at, remember, and absorb. In this section, we go over the icons that we use throughout the book to guide you on your Twitter journey.

The Tip icon points out helpful information that’s likely to improve your Twitter experience.

The Remember icon marks interesting or useful facts that we cover in detail in earlier chapters or something that’s so important that you need to remember it while you’re using Twitter.

The Privacy icon denotes that you should be careful about the Twitter activities that we’re discussing. You may find yourself with a security or privacy concern.

The Warning icon highlights potential danger. When we use this icon, we’re letting you know that you should proceed with caution.

Whenever you see this icon, rest assured that we’re letting our inner geeks run wild. Here we point out information that’s interesting but not absolutely necessary to your understanding of the topic at hand. If you want all the details you can get, read these paragraphs. If you just want to know the basics, skip it.