According to Twitstats, about 32% of twitter users tweet through their browsers. All of us start off by using twitter through a browser. Its only as we follow more and more people and engage in more conversations that we start to feel the need for an application as the browser can no longer keep up with the constant updates.

For those who’re still twittering through a web browser, figuring out shortcuts can make their twittering lives extremely easy. Even though the scale of tweets makes it viable for us to twitter through app’s, there are some things that twitter does best through a browser.

1. @ Replies

The first and most common function of twittering is replying to a tweet. In a browser you have the option of clicking on an arrow to reply to a tweet. Typing @ before the username of the subject does the same. There is no space between @ and the username. Example: “@username This is how your reply would look”.

Note: @username is counted in the 140 characters. The longer the username the lesser number of characters you’ll have to type your message.

2. Direct Message

Popularly known as a DM, direct messages are private messages sent to you or vice versa. They are also 140 characters long and can only be seen by you and the user they’re between. Instead of clicking on the DM option on the left sidebar menu on your twitter homepage and the selecting the username, it’s easier to send a DM directly from the message window.

To send someone a direct message, type d, hit space and then type the username before typing out your message. It would look like: “d @username type your message here”.

3. Re-tweet

If you’ve been on twitter for more than a day, you must have seen tweets starting with ‘RT’. RT stands for retweet and is a way of promoting someone’s tweet. To retweet, type RT followed by @username and then copy paste the tweet you’re retweeting. Once done, it would look like this: “RT @username paste your tweet here.”

4. # Tags

Hash tags took me the most time to figure out. Twitter is pretty basic. You can’t group together users, or turn your followers into groups. One way of separating tweets about a particular topic or by a particular user is by adding # in front of it.

If you’re talking about cricket and/or a certain tournament, adding a # before cricket would form a group. Now every time someone would tag cricket, the tweets would be grouped together. A hash tag for cricket would look like “#cricket”.

To keep track of your hash tags, follow @hashtag. It will automatically follow you back and start tracking your tags. For more information, check out the Twitter Fan Wiki.

5. Twitter Search

Not only does twitter bring you in contact with people outside of your immediate circle, it lets you search it for specific topics too. Twitter Search is a great way to find out who’s talking about the topic of your interest in real time. You can also search for hash tags through twitter search.

6. Following conversations

Twitter offers three options regarding the @ replies.
@ replies to the people I’m following: This is the default setting and only lets you see the tweets between people you follow. For example If A & B are having a conversation, you’ll be able to see it because you follow them both. But if A was talking to C, you wouldn’t see that conversation because you don’t follow C.

No @ replies does not show any @ replies at all.

All @ replies: This option shows you all the replies of people you follow. If they’re replying to people you don’t follow, you’ll see those too. All @ replies is the way to go if you want to be effective on twitter. It’ll let you follow different conversations and help you discover new people. It will also make you more visible to the followers of the people you’re conversing with.

To enable All @ replies go to Setting –> Notices –> Show me all @ replies.

7. Twitter Backgrounds:

Twitter offers the option to change backgrounds to make your profile more interesting. Go to Settings –> Designs. Choose from any of the 12 designs already available on twitter. You can also change your background image to one of your own and customize the colors according to your preference.

8. Twitter With SMS

If you’re going to be away from your computer, twitter lets you stay connected by sending tweets via SMS. This option is less feasible as texting rates apply. Also now there are twitter app’s designed for cell phones but when twitter first came out, this option was very popular as it lets you receive tweets on your cell phone too. If you want to enable this option, go to Settings.

9. Twitter Badges

If you have a blog or social networking profile (and I really hope you do) then you can publish your tweets on them through twitter badges or widgets.

10. Public Timeline

Want to know what the twitterverse is talking about at any given moment? Find out through the public timeline. To be honest, this one seems like a cool idea till you realize that people are tweeting in other languages too. Ones that I don’t understand.

If you’re a twittering noob, I hope you found this helpful. My next post “10 Twitter Tools” would be up on February 11th. If you have any questions and would like an answer to them, feel free to contact me.

Technorati Tags: Social Networking, Twitter, Twitter tips, Twitter tricks

I started Twittering after attending an online writing conference. Everyone there was giving out their twitter id for contact rather than email or website/blog! So I dusted out my old twitter account which I had forgotten I had and started following people. Suddenly, people were recognising me from the conference and I had conversations going on.

Great Writing Exercise

It wasn’t until I got active on twitter that I realised what a great writing exercise twittering is! It can be the perfect case study for concise writing. Having just 140 characters to get your message across in an effective method is not an easy task. Yet, millions of people are doing it every day.

Productivity Booster

If you’re looking for something, tweeting about it can have great results. As a writer, I find I can’t work on one article/blog post etc at a time. When I’m writing, I have at least a couple documents open so that I can jump between them. Working out of MS Word made too much of a clutter from having too many windows open. So I tweeted,

‘I wish there was a text editor that would open up docs in tabs! Working 5 inter related articles and it sucks to have so many windows open.’

In a short while, I had a lot of replies telling me about programs that had the tabs option in them. Most of them were for Mac but someone recommended ‘IBM Lotus Symphony’. I looked it up and it was everything I needed. Working has been so much easier and faster since then!

Promotional Tool

Twitter is a great promotion tool. It also helps us discover the best of the web. When people tweet about blog posts or websites they found interesting or helpful, droves of users click on it driving traffic to the site. Similarly when people publish posts on their own blog, they tweet about that too (it’s only fair) which drives traffic to their post. This results in a lot more feedback in the comments and more readers.

It has also been used to promote products and campaigns. Social Networking is effective. More so, twitter is effective. A big reason for Barack Obama’s successful campaign was social networking. His team knew how to work the Social Media and for a long time (at least till it counted) he was the most followed person on Twitter.

Finding People In Your Geographical Location

I moved to UAE early last year. I had no family here and no friends. Through twitter, I started discovering people who live in Dubai or Sharjah and suddenly I know people! I’m making friends and finding out about events of my interest. Since my bio states ‘Freelance writer in the making’, people from the publishing industry have found their way to me and through them I discovered even more. Of course, it could just be because there are so few twitterers from UAE that we tend to find each other… but it’s good to see social media alive in companies in this part of the world.

Giving Back What You Receive

For any social networking medium to work. It has to be a give and take relationship. You can’t just keep expecting people to answer your call of help if you don’t help them back.

• Make it a point to engage in conversations with people
• Answer questions that are asked
• Re-tweet an article if you like it or simply if someone asks
• Share interesting links often – at least twice more than you do your own
• Tweet about blog posts of your readers
• Make it a point to send direct messages to your followers. Stay away from automated welcome DM’s though.

Twitter is all the rage these days. Just like Facebook was before that, Myspace I believe still is. Or maybe I’ve just gotten the hang of it these past few days, but Twitter be cool – and I am addicted!

While its easier to figure out Facebook and Myspace; Twitter is a whole new concept. To put it simply, Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that asks “What are you doing?” and expects you to answer in 140 characters or less. Apart from that, Twitter is whatever you make it.

I found Twitteroid at Terry Whalin’s website. It doesn’t delve into the deeper uses of Twitter. It simply tells you how to set up your account and how to use it sensibly. It covers everything one will come across while using Twitter. Setting up an account, public timeline, twittering through instant messaging services and mobile phones, changing profile background image or colors etc are systematically explained.

Twitteroid is a good, practical read if you’re afraid of jumping into a new service that will take time away from your work. Of course if you’re Internet savvy, it’ll take you about 5 minutes to figure out twitter.

I use twitter in the most basic way. Simple updates with some links thrown in every now and then. I reply to other people’s tweets if I find I have some thing to add and DM (direct message) some times.

Beware: Twitter is highly addictive once you get the hang of it.

Do you Twitter? Follow me @samarowais. I’d love to hear from you! How fast did you catch the Twitter bug? Did you get addicted immediately or did it take you time?