Design Tab
Here you can change the background of your Twitter page from the default. Twitter provides a number of alternatives that you can select or you can upload your own background. You can also change all the colors if you wish. Again, whatever you do, just change it so you are not running the default. It shows you have taken some time setting up your account.
A note here worth mentioning is that with the plethora of Twitter client applications out there, many people don’t even look at your web page anymore. Still, it is one component of your presence on Twitter and is worth doing well. Later on I will show you places where you can get a more professional background than those offered here.
Well, that’s it for the setup. The last thing to do now is to click on Home at the top of the screen and send your first Tweet. Something like, Hi, I’ve just joined Twitter and am looking forward to meeting interesting people is a good first one to send. Just type it in and click the Update button.
Twitter Client Applications
The biggest problem with the standard Twitter web application is that you have to keep an eagle eye on your replies and Direct Messages as you only see the main Tweetstream on the screen. It is also limited in that it only displays about the last 20 tweets, so if you want to see older ones, you have to keep going back pages. So what to do?
Easy, download Tweetdeck from
Tweetdeck is brilliant in that it displays the Tweetstream, your replies and your direct messages all on the one screen. The message columns allow for 500 tweets as a default, so scrolling down allows you to go back a fair way or search for tweets you may want to refer back to.
The screen has a continuous right hand scroll, so you can set up different groups and their tweets will appear in that column. You might have a group called best friends and another for gardeners for instance. That way you don’t miss important tweets from people who are more important to you than others. At the time of writing, Tweetdeck is probably the most widely used application for Twitter and I would highly recommend it to you.
http://www.tweetdeck.com The first thing you will probably notice is that you will need to change the settings as the default is white text on a black screen. Makes it hard to read I’ve found, but each to their own.Your Tweets
Start getting some tweets into the system now. On the Twitter home page, it asks What You Are Doing. Quite frankly many people don’t care until you have built a relationship with them as a result of following. But there are some good ways to get started. Follow some blogs that you are interested in via an RSS feed to a feed reader such as Google. (Search these on Google if you are not familiar with the terms. There is heaps of information on there and could occupy an ebook of its own.) Start by posting links to interesting posts on Twitter about them with a link to the blog post. For example: Interesting post on pest control in tomatos. Link. Make sure you always include http:// in the link and not just www so the link is clickable in the Tweetstream. If it’s a long link, Tweetdeck has a facility to shorten it to a small url.
Another good way of starting out tweeting is with quotes. Do a search for some quotes of interest and tweet these. Personal development ones are great and also quotes by famous people. Here’s one I just found in the Tweetstream as an example: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle. There are thousands of these all over the internet that you can use.
Whatever you do, at no stage of your Twitter career start posting sales tweet after sales tweet. Your career will be shortlived if you do and people will unfollow you very quickly. Twitter is about engagement, value and a social experience. A constant flow of sales links is just not on. By all means post links to your products or sites, but keep them to around 5% of your total tweets at the most.
Another good idea with your tweeting is to keep religion and politics out of them. These subjects can only alienate followers and you can lose them.