Simmessa blog

Thanks to zeroinfluence and his excellent blog for “lending” this image

Never stop absorbing new informations. Twitter is the embodiment of this motto, a self marketing toolI’ve been speaking about in the past. I find it very useful to discover things on the net that I’d never be able to find out myself. I’m currently following a lot of designers and no day has passed without some new trick coming out of their hat or some new features / upgrades that were made available for my favourite apps. It’s quite useful, very simple to use and you won’t lose as much time as let’s say Facebook and the subsequent trashing of stupid notification emails of all kinds. If you decide to dump facebook because of this or the recent changes in their TOC and policy, and you decide to embrace twitter…I’m with you

Today I want to show you how to develop and maximise your potential on Twitter with some unique tools, some of which are just fancy while the others are very useful. But before diving into the topic let’s cover the basics for those among you that aren’t avid tweeters already.

How and why you should use twitter

Twitter enables its users to post updates about their status, what they’re doing, questions, answers and so on. The system limits your tweets (i.e.: the updates) to a length limit of 140 characters, as this is the maximum size of sms notification.

With twitter you just have text and that’s all you need, simple right?

Keeping the service uncomplicated is one of twitter strongest points.

Twitter mechanics are very simple, every other user on the network can be categorized as belonging to one of these groups:

• Users you follow
• Users that are following you
• All other users

When you decide to follow somebody on twitter you’ll just start receiving his/her status updates.

Anybody who’s following you will receive your updates and so on.

There’s no obligation,when you follow somebody,that he or she has to follow you as well. You just have a limit to the maximum number of people you can follow, which I think of as a measure to keep performance acceptable. There are no limits imposed on the amount of people that can follow you. You can post your tweets as replies to other tweets and users and it’s pretty much like your typical instant messaging tool without real time.

This is pretty much all I can say about the service from a formal perspective. So, what about content? how should you use twitter?

I think the ultimate goal here is to publicize yourself. Use it as a showcase of your latest works or activities, build up on your followers to make a deeper impact and reach a bigger audience for your product or work. At least this is my perspective ’cause under this light twitter can be a very effective tool.

First of all, let’s talk about how NOT to use twitter.

Many first timers here think about microblogging the wrong way, here’s a typical twitter stream:

Simmessa: Woke up early
Simmessa: going for a coffee, it’s friday thanks god!
Simmessa: traffic jammed on his way to work
Simmessa: …more crap

Rule number one for a good twitter use: don’t write updates about stuff EVEN you don’t give a cr@p about!

Have you seen much people out there doing a blog post on their typical morning? Of course there are,and there can be exceptions but the fact that updates are smaller doesn’t mean they have to be insignificant!

Here’s a more proper twitter stream:

Simmessa: checking out the latest Heroes episode, things get creepy with that Sylar guy…
Simmessa: anybody there listening to Billy Talent?I just found out some worthy rarities.
Simmessa:Just gave the finishing touch to my online web design portfolio.
Simmessa: going out for mexican food,anything worthy it around Milan?
Simmessa: got google latitude on my phone, smoking hot!
Simmessa: Debian 5.0 (codename Lenny) is out! Grab the x86 dvd torrent

and so on…

look at the way updates pose more interaction to other users, you don’t have to limit yourself to status updates,you post your discoveries, questions, you conversate with other users and so on.

A typical reply to one of my latest tweets would be:

Jeremy: @simmessa check out the Mexicali in via Valtellina, it’s very good and the price’s just right.

Don’t use twitter for meaningless stuff,nobody cares about that… This simple concept is something most newbies do not seem to get right, not before their 100th tweet at least.

Rule number 2: follow the right people, follow as many as you can

Another good thing that will help you get ‘into’ twitter is to find the right people to follow. I’m mostly interested to web design, technology, photography and music. I have found some relevant people to follow, people that share my interests. There are lists out there of people that are ‘hot’ on twitter, BarackObama has nearly 2 milions followers…he’s the most popolar guy on twitter, but I’m not following him cause I’m not very interested right now. There’s a very useful top 100 with the most popular twitter users, you should start with that to decide who’s worth following. But if you’re looking for ways to have lots of followers, beware! going above 1000 followers is pretty though stuff! A good rule of thumb when looking for interesting users to follow is to check who is interesting for the users you follow! Otherwise check out these lists:

List of bands and musicians on twitter
List of celebrities on twitter
List of designers on twitter

Twitter tools: beyond the basics

What’s curious in the twitter world is that, in contrast to the other services out there (facebook in primis) everything has been stripped down to the bare status updates thing. If you want to extend twitter functionalities you’d have to rely on the useful APIs that the kind developers made available to the world.

Of course nowadays being open brings much fruit. That’s why you’ll find hundreds of services that have been built on top of the twitter APIs together with some clever hacks. Those services range from the demential, anything but useful to the imprescindible, with a lot of great stuff in between. I’ll try to make a roundup of the most useful ones in the next part of this article: Twitter tools and tricks of the trade.