Thursday, April 22, 2010

Twitter

As you know, we've just joined Twitter and I'm starting to get the hang of it.
Sign in - easy.
Write a short comment - not so easy, but the letter counter helps.
Retweet - yes, I can do that.
Check what everyone else is saying - yes.
Joining in the conversations - no, don't think I've quite got the hang of that yet but I'm working on it.

Then on to more advanced things. Thanks to Krista Davis on the Cosy Chicks blog I'm sort of getting to grips with hashtags but I'm still not sure about a few things so if there are any Twitter experts out there, help would be appreciated. Here are the things I can't work out at the moment.

I've noticed that some people say, Thanks for the shout, and I seem to remember reading somewhere that it's polite to give shouts, but I've no idea what they are.

What are the lists about?

How do I use things like #FF ? I know it means Follow Friday but it doesn't really help me as I just get an image of Robinson Crusoe following Man Friday's footsteps across the beach, and even though I'm a twitter novice I'm pretty sure this isn't what it means :) If I put it in my tweet, does it mean I will follow someone on Fridays? Or will I always follow them? Or will they follow me? Or does it mean I should follow the link and follow someone else? Or . . . the trouble with a writer's imagination is that I can think of a hundred possibilities and it's very possible that none of them are right.

The same with #MM #TT etc - help!

And as I sit here looking out onto my untidy garden ( soon to be tidy, I hope) I'm trying to work out if Jane Austen was lucky or unlucky that Twitter wasn't around when she was writing, because the one thing I have discovered about Twitter is that it's addictive. So that's where I'm heading off to - just as soon as I've finished writing the blurb for my Christmas novella, which will be out as a part of A Darcy Christmas in November. Yes, I know it's only April, but everything happens months in advance in the publishing industry!

Amanda Grange

4 comments:

Rachael Hale said...

Thank you so much for asking these questions! I am a twitter and blog novice myself so will definitely be checking back for an update.

Good luck with unscrambling it all.
Rachael

Charleybrown said...

Hi!
I've been on Twitter for while now and still am frustrated at times by the structure of it. Sometimes it does feel like there's a whole lot going on and you don't know how to keep up! I just discovered that if someone replies to another person, you can click underneath the tweet where it says, "in reply to" and it takes you to the first person's tweet. Wish I had known that before I tried in vain to follow conversations! I've found by following @Twitter_Tips that I've discovered other helpful tips.

And knowing that we'll always miss something is okay. I just read this article which talks about the flow of Twitter.
http://bigisthenewsmall.com/?p=4819

Another thing I would suggest is that if you don't know what a hashtag means just click on the hashtag and you'll probably figure it out. For instance, I don't know what #MM stands for but can only wonder if someone could have been referring to Matthew Macfadyen? :)

Hope that helps a bit!

Jan Jones said...

# is simply a way of grouping all the tweets on a particular subject

#ff (follow Friday) is suggesting twitterers for other people to follow. It gets done on a Friday so as not to clog up the twitterverse on the other days.

Then there is #ww (writers on Wednesday) for more specific people to follow if you feel like it.

Clicking on a hashtag will bring up all the posts with that hashtag.

Amanda said...

Thanks for the help! It's very confusing but also strangely addictive.