Monday, August 3, 2009

Twitter Update #3

I remembered something else that I need to mention. Each new experience has a learning curve, and Twitter is no exception. An important promotional device is the retweet. What a user does is copy someone else's tweet and then send it as a retweet. By doing this, the user exposes the other person's tweet to their followers and a whole new group of people. It helps spread the word. Here is an example: On July 22, Bonanzle made the following tweet:
Affiliates Program launched in beta, and a *real* Tweeter is on the way! http://www.bonanzle.com/blogs
I then decided to retweet it by posting this:
RT @bonanzle: Affiliates Program launched in beta, and a *real* Tweeter is on the way! http://www.bonanzle.com/blogs
The way to do a retweet is to put "RT" for "retweet" at the beginning of the tweet and then to put @ followed by the user name of the person who did the original tweet. Next, place the rest of the tweet on the end. The @ followed by the user name sends a message to the user letting them know that a retweet has been done. It only took me at least a week (ha) to figure out where to go in my account to see these types of messages that people have sent. On the right side of the screen is a link titled "@booksforgirls" which is where I click to see all tweets that contain @booksforgirls. If you register on Twitter, make sure you click that link to see if people are commenting directly to you. Once you get a lot of followers, it gets hard to keep up with direct comments unless you check that location. If you use Bonanzle, what you can do is start following people who also use Bonanzle. I found the easiest way to locate the active users is to do a search for "Bonanzle" and follow the people who have posted recently. Most of them will follow you right back. You will also get some spammers following you, and I have blocked those who have questionable intent, like the ones who have links to content that is of a lascivious nature. I don't care to have that kind of stuff connected to my account. Right off when I joined Twitter, I had a few of those people follow me because my id contains the word "girls."

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