I get a lot of questions about Twitter. Some are answered in my Twitter Guide though that’s quite large to wade through so I thought it would be useful to put together a Twitter FAQ with the most commonly asked questions.
What is Twitter?
Ok this is one question where I will refer you straight to my Twitter guide! What is Twitter is the title of part #1 of the guide.
How Do You Get Twitter Followers?
There are lots of ways. First of all if you have a web presence such as a website or blog, make sure you advertise your Twitter profile prominently. This can just be a simple text link like I use in my sidebar. For WordPress blogs you can take this a step further and use a widget to display your latest tweets.
If you don’t have a web presence try some blog commenting but using your Twitter Profile as your link. Also insert your link into email or forum signatures if you use those. I now have mine in my Warrior Forum sig. Another way to pick up a few followers is to just follow other people in your chosen area of interest - there are still some people who follow back anyone who follows them!
How To Find Twitter Users in Your Niche
Finding people that use Twitter who are interested in your niche is actually quite easy. You just have to get a little creative with a Twitter Search Engine. Simply enter some keywords related to your niche, focusing especially on current hot topics or trends. The search engine will bring back all recent tweets containing those terms then all you need to do is look at the tweet and if it looks relevant click through to the user profile to see what other things that user tweets about.
For example, to find people in this niche I searched for things such as ‘thirty day challenge’, ‘blog mastermind’, ‘affiliate marketing’ and so on.
Embedding Links Into Twitter
If you use Twitter directly from their home page (not recommended), links are pasted as-is, in full and with a restriction of just 140 characters you can run out of room quickly. However several of the Twitter tools such as Twhirl (runs on most platforms) or TwitterFox (a Firefox plugin) will take your link and automatically encode it using a url-shortening service such as TinyURL. All you do is paste your link and hit enter.
Can I Organize Twitter Followers?
Not through the main Twitter API but there is a utility called CrowdStatus that allows you to categorize your Twitter followers into crowds so you could have a crowd for work colleagues, another for family and so on. It then displays tweets neatly grouped into their crowds. Mark O’Neill has a more in-depth explanation of CrowdStatus on his blog.
How To Hack a Private Twitter Account
There are some Twitter accounts that are marked private which means that you cannot automatically follow the updates by clicking a button - you have to ask permission. To all those people asking how to hack these accounts, you can’t! Just ask nicely 
And as a rule of thumb, it’s generally a bad idea to mark your updates private if you want to get any followers!
How to Setup Twitter Notifications
It’s always nice to know when people are talking about you. On the web and in the blogosphere you can setup a Google alert but that does not cover Twitter. There is a service called Twilert which acts just like Google alerts but for Twitter. Setup alerts on your name, brand, products or whatever and you will be notified by email when these terms are tweeted.
How Do I Make a Twitter Application?
Ok first up you need programming skillz! Twitter has recently opened up an API which allows developers to build applications that interrogate Twitter in a number of ways. You can write Twitter applications in a number of languages such as C++, Java and PHP.
How to Make a Twitter Digest
There are two ways of creating a Twitter digest, depending on exactly what it is you want to do. If you are following people that tweet often and you can’t keep up with them, you can use a web tool called Twitter Digest to package up tweets from these people into a single RSS feed that you can subscribe to. You can also use this service to create a digest of your own tweets but if you are wanting to display these on your blog, the Twitter Tools plugin that I mentioned earlier has built in functionality to create a daily digest of your tweets and automatically post it your blog. Ed Dale used to do this.
How to Tweet Your RSS Feed
If you want to have an RSS feed automatically tweeted to your Twitter account as it is published you can use a service called TwitterFeed to do this. It allows you to customise how often to post on your behalf. If the feed you wish to publish is your blog feed then an alternative is that Twitter Tools plugin that I keep talking about!
How Do I Send My Plurks to Twitter?
Plurk is another micro-blogging tool that came out last year. It’s rather nice and has lots of cool features but it doesn’t yet have the same following as Twitter. What do you do when you want to use both but don’t want to update two services? FeedTweeter is an application that allows you to do just that (and the other way around if you prefer). It also works with other services allowing you to tweet your delicious bookmarks for instance.
How Do I Tweet My Stumbles?
This is another question I get asked alot but as of yet, I don’t know of any tool or service that allows you to automatically send the pages you thumb up on StumbleUpon to your Twitter account. If you know how, please let me know and I’ll update this question!
Where to Get Twitter Badges & Buttons
Twitter badges are just another name for plugins that you can put on your site containing Twitter information in real time. A Twitter button is really the same thing as a badge, just smaller. There are lots of types of badges and buttons available, and Darren Rowse has a massive list of them on his Twitter Tips blog.
How do I Automatically Follow People That Follow Me?
As I mentioned earlier, some people like to follow back everybody that follows them. Personally I don’t recommend that strategy but this question gets asked a lot so who I am to judge There is a site called TweetLater which allows you to setup tweets at a specific time (very useful btw!) and as part of the account creation, you can select an option to automatically follow people who follow you. Dave Taylor explains the process in more detail.
Can Twitter Be Used Privately Between Two People?
Yes it can but a proper instant messaging tool is much better. The mistake many people make is thinking that @cmiddlebrook is a private tweet and it’s not. I will see this highlighted by my Twitter client but all the followers of the person who sent it will see it too. In order to send a private tweet to somebody you must use the following format ‘d username message’ but there is an extra rule - both parties must be following each other. So of course only the people I follow (which is not many) can directly message me in this way.
How Do I Purge Inactive Twitter Followers?
Again, this is something that I am often asked but at the moment there is no automatic way of doing this. To do it automatically the Twitter API would need to expose information that showed the date of the last activity of a user but it doesn’t do that yet to my knowledge.
What is Twitter # (Twitter Hash Tags)?
Twitter hash tags are a way of organising tweets into certain subjects or groups. This is a community driven convention and it simply allows users to find related tweets more easily. For example, many community events will have a #tag created such as #30dc for the Thirty Day Challenge and this allows people to search on #30dc or set up an alert as described earlier. So far, Twitter has not added any official support for hashtags.
How Do I Upload Pictures to Twitter?
You cannot directly embed an image into a tweet as it is a text-only format but there is a service called TwitPic that allows you to easily insert image URL’s into twitter. Many Twitter clients now have in-built support for TwitPic.
If you have any questions about twitter that haven’t been answered in this Twitter FAQ then please feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll either update the post or do a follow up to it.
{ 0 comments… add one now }