Twitter Jargon Demystified – Part 2

As the title implies, there is a Part 1 to this article.  If you have not read it yet, you can find it here.  In Part 1 we talked about hash (#) tags, twitter handles and Direct Messages, as well as an introduction to Twitter.

Here we are looking at some more of the commonly used terms in twitter.

Retweets

When you see a tweet that you think your followers would like or be of value to them you can retweet their post out to your followers.  As you hover over a tweet some options will appear – favourites, retweet and reply.

Click the retweet tab and the tweet will open in a new box where you simply click the reply button.

If you want to see more information about who is retweeting what, click on the retweet tab.  A drop down menu will appear with three options:

1. Retweets by others
2. Retweets by you
3. Your tweets, retweeted

Click on any of these options.  So. if you want to see who has retweeted your tweets, click the third option.

It is easy to distinguish if a tweet has been retweeted as it will have the retweet icon – 2 arrows that together make a box.  This will appear at the top of a tweet, followed by the name of the person that retweeted it.

It is always nice to thank people that have retweeted your content – you can do this either as a normal tweet with an @mention, (this will be explained shortly) or in a Direct Message.

 @Replies

If you would like to reply to a tweet, hover over the tweet and click the reply link.  A new box will appear that starts with @username (the username of the person you are replying to). Your replies will show up in your @Mention tab on your homepage.

@Mention

A mention is any tweet that contains @username anywhere in the tweet. That is why @replies can be found in your Mentions tab. 

Type a message and use @username instead of using a person's actual name.  Once tweeted this turns into a link that people can click on to go to that person's profile.

Sometimes you will get an @reply or @mention and are not sure what they are referring to.  Click on the tweet and in the right column it will show 'in reply to' and show the original tweet as well.

People use @mentions to help promote other people.

Here is an example:

1. @friendsofsocial is promoting other users.
2. This person has just used my name to promote their own link.
3. @mariocoronatv is using a different way to retweet.  He is retweeting my original posts, sending it 'via' me and also adding a hello to everybody.
4. @troolsocial is promoting other users.
5. @tournantinc has retweeted (see RT at the beginning) and is promoting my latest blog post.

All of these people mentioned here and the ones promoted in tweet 1 and 4 would be great people to follow!!

The last thing I am going to cover here is 'Favourite' tweets.  If you see a tweet that you really like, you can hover over it and click 'favourite'.  To see your favourite tweets, when you in your profile click on the favourite tab and they will all show up in there.

It there is anything else you would like covered please leave the suggestion in the comments box below.

See you on Twitter! – @staceylmyers.