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 a few thousand tweets over the last few years (@adzebill) so here’s my advice, for what it’s worth.

Following

Don’t be a wimp: to get the full effect, try following 50–100 people. That’s enough to get some variety without being completely overwhelming. Remember, you can just dip into Twitter once a day or so: you don’t have to read every tweet! Equal proportions of professional colleagues, friends, and random interesting people seems to work well. Look for noteworthy tweets quoted (or “retweeted”) by your friends, and check out the writer’s twitterstream. People will sometimes suggest folks to follow on Follow Friday (look for the hashtag #ff).

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 breaking 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. Retweeting works best if you add a comment of your own; I tend to use square brackets to make it clear what is commentary. It’s OK to edit a retweet a little to make it fit.

Hashtags

A common label for multiple tweets, identified by a # sign, you can click on a #hashtag to see all the tweets using it. Hashtags take three forms. They’re fabulous for tracking 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.

Replying

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. If someone happens to be following both of you, they’ll see it.

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.) To send a message to strangers, then, this means you’ll need to use an @reply (but then other people could read your message), or follow them and hope they follow you back (which is considered fairly polite), or @reply to them asking them to follow you so you can message them privately. All a bit more complicated than email.

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: whenever there’s a quake in Christchurch, there’s a flurry of activity on the #eqnz hashtag as people try to guess the magnitude.

More advice

Tweet regularly but don’t obsess about frequency, or how many followers you have. Your tweets are public, so don’t get too precious about who’s reading or following you. You can block anyone you don’t like the look of, though, and if they are following thousands of people but only tweet advertisements they’re probably spammers, so go ahead and report them. 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: see how it can be used with students, and ideas lists for academia in general and the classroom.