In 2008, only 5% of the U.S. population was aware of Twitter; today, it’s 87%, about as many as know about Facebook. But far fewer people use Twitter than Facebook, which is a shame, as Twitter has lots of uses, and is not as evil. If you’re interested in getting started with it this Profhacker article is good value. Read it first, then go to Twitter and sign up with a nice short lower-case username. I’ve posted about 1000 tweets over the last year or two (@adzebill) so here’s my advice for what it’s worth.

Following

To get the full effect, try following 50–100 people. That’s enough to get plenty of variety without being completely overwhelming. You don’t have to read every tweet! Look for good retweets from your friends, or suggestions on Follow Friday (the hashtag is #ff). Equal parts colleagues, friends, and random interesting people seems to work well.

What to post

Share something that people might actually be interested in: links to web pages with your commentary, interesting photos you’ve taken, funny observations, and local news like a fire or police emergency. Find a specialised area of interest and post on it regularly; you’ll attract similarly-specialised followers. You’ll need to use a URL-shortening service for your links; I like SnipUrl, because it lets you pick your own keyword to use as the url.

Retweeting

RT preceding a Twitter name means a reposting of someone else’s tweet. This works best if you add a comment of your own; I tend to use square brackets. It’s not a bad idea to leave room in your own tweets for your name and RT, in case someone wants to retweet you. It’s OK to edit a retweet a little to make it fit.

Hashtags

Click on a #hashtag to see all the tweets using it. Hashtags take three forms. They’re fabulous for follow discussions about a particular event, like a conference (and many conferences publicise their official hashtag well in advance). They can also be used to mark a spontanous mass joke or conversation—you’re welcome to chip in with your own contribution. Finally, a hashtag can be a parenthetical comment on the tweet you’ve just written, not really intended for reuse.

Public replies

Starting a tweet with someone’s @username means they’ll see that tweet, and it’ll be visible in your Twitter stream, but it won’t appear to all your followers, only those following both of you. This is whatÆs called a public reply. If you want the reply to be REALLY public—if it’s of interest to more than just the recipient—add a character before the .@username, like a dot.

Messaging

You can also use Twitter to privately message someone, but here’s the catch: they have to be following you (you don’t have to be following them, though). To contact strangers, you’ll need to use a public reply, or follow them and hope they follow you back (it’s considered fairly polite).

Searches in Twitter

A Google search tells you facts about something; a Twitter search tells you what people think about something. It can be fascinating to compare the two, whether it’s with movies, natural disasters, or political events. Twitter tends to respond faster than the mainstream media to breaking news too.

More advice

Tweet regularly but don’t obsess about frequency, or how many followers you have. Block the spammers. Install a twitter client, like Tweetie or Tweetdeck, on your computer or iPhone—they’re a big improvement over the website. You can delete a tweet mistake if you catch it on the Twitter page fast enough. Give Twitter a try: follow a decent number of people for a month and check in each day, and only then decide if it’s just people prattling on about what they had for breakfast.

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The best place to start is this excellent overview of Twitter with lots of detailed ideas, quotes, and links. The Twitter Book by O’Reilly and Milstein (O’Reilly, 2009) is the best printed introduction, and I like the 100 tips to being a better Twitterer. Twitter in also taking off in universities as a teaching tool: how it can be used with students, and ideas lists for academia in general and the classroom.