A friend of mine joined Twitter this morning, because I told him to and he’s a good boy.

His pathetic air of confusion and lost-puppy-ness inspired me to impart some of the knowledge I’ve gained since becoming a regular user of the service about a month ago, which might be useful for other Twitter newbies too. Twitter is highly addictive, and people will attempt to explain their addiction with cunning use of words like “networking” or “link-building”, but let’s face it we really all just want to see Stephen Fry’s new haircut. There need be no shame in this.

Without further ado then…

Use Hashtags

You’ll see them everywhere, basically a word with # before it gets picked up by various other sites, which list tweets by hashtag. The two I’ve used so far are hashtags.org, though bear in mind you need to follow @hashtags before you’ll be listed, and tweetertags.com where as well as viewing lists of the recent tweets containing a tag you can also tag yourself with your interests in the hopes of attracting more followers.

Download a Client

Nobody wants to sit on the actual Twitter site all day, refreshing the page in the hopes of someone saying something deep and meaningful, so save yourself the worry of missing out by downloading a client to beep annoyingly at you at regular intervals. My beepy thing of choice is twhirl, basically because it’s the first one I came across. I understand that Tweetdeck is popular too, though it looks a bit bulky for my taste. Whatever, pick one.

Reply to Strangers

It took me a while to get over The Fear of replying to people who don’t know me with random gibberish, but thankfully I’ve lost whatever shame I started out with. Replies from those with many followers can result in more for you, and more followers = good.

Learn the Lingo

This is actually one I’m still working on. We’ve covered #hashtags,  RT in a tweet means it’s a “re-tweet” (ie reposting something interesting you’ve seen from someone else), and @ lets you reply to someone. Note you can also reply to a specific tweet by clicking the little arrow sybol next to it if you’re on the website, or the @ symbol if you’re using twhirl.

Link to your Twitter feed everywhere

On your blog, in your website profiles, on your Mother’s Day card, everywhere you can possibly fit it in. A Twitter user is by definition cool at the moment, no matter what drivel they spout.

Follow @Holygod

Because who doesn’t really want to know what God is thinking?

There you go, follow my tips and you’re  100% guaranteed to be popular and get all the girls, or boys, or epix, or cake. Or, why not, just have all of the above.

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