Don’t Get Confused By Twitter – Part Three

So by now you have set up your Twitter account, you’re tweeting away with friends and following people you’re interested in. But what is all this jargon being thrown at you? Re-tweet this, hashtag that, check out this meme! We have put together a list to help you.

Understanding Twitter Terminology

Part of the fun of Twitter is getting to know all the little terms that help to make you feel part of a community but to speed up the process we have taken some of the most popular terms and given them a short description.

DM or Direct Message

You might have come across the term DM before as it infiltrates contemporary communication language. On Twitter, like most other social platforms, a DM or direct message is the private conversation between you and one of your followers. It is a way to talk to someone directly. Direct messages can be found on the right side of the screen.

Hashtag

You might have noticed us mentioning these in part two of our guide when talking about finding people to follow. To put it simply, by employing a hashtag in your post it will become organised into a category, or if enough people are using the same hastag at that moment, it could feature in Twitter Trending Topics. For instance, let’s say you post, “Voted sixty times in tonight’s showdown. #PopIdol.” Your message would then be part of Twitter search results for “#PopIdol.” It is a great way to organise your posts and find like-minded people.

Lists

Lists are, well, lists of Twitter users created and categorized by other Twitter users. You can follow entire lists rather than having to follow each individual user. You can also set up your own lists with the option of making them public or private. I’ve found them incredibly useful to sort out people I am following and followers.

Reply or @reply

To reply to another Twitter user, or include them in a tweet, you put an @ symbol before their username. If the @symbol is the first character in the tweet, the reply will be shown to them and anyone following both of you. If the @ symbol is not the first character, then the tweet will be shown to all of your followers, plus the person whose username follows the @. This is useful to remember when replying to someone with something that you feel would be off use to all your followers.

RT or Retweet

Ahh, perhaps the most popular of Twitterisms. Retweets are re-broadcasts of another user’s tweet. This is traditionally done by including an “RT” before the original poster’s @username. In the right hand control panel you’ll also find a retweet section which shows which of your tweets have been retweeted and by whom along with whose tweets you’ve retweeted yourself. Handy to see what traction, if any, you’re tweets are having with people and it also offers a chance to connect with users interested in your tweets.

Shortened URLs

With just 140 characters at your disposal, Twitter doesn’t give you much room to include URL links - some of which are longer than 140 characters themselves. There are also a number of services - URL shorteners - that take regular links and shrink them down to a manageable length for tweets, and some even let you track clicks if you sign up for an account (bit.ly being one of the most popular).

Memes

Twitter Memes are trends, activities or sayings associated with Twitter. It might be something you do individually, things that have grown up around Twitter that make it more useful (Retweets and Hashtags are two examples), or might be something people do as a group for fun. Popular Twitter memes to look out for are:

• #musicmonday – share what you are listening
• Follow Friday (#ff) – this is a great list for building your followers
• #wisdomwed – a fun fact of the day type group
• #rtthursday – the popular way to thank your retweeters

By understanding Twitter you can make the most of your experiences on the popular social network, unlike Mr. Gervais. I just hope that this three part guide will help basic understanding of Twitter so that you can start squeezing the value out of it.

Has this guide been helpful? Let us know in the comments below.