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A glossary of Twitter terms for small businesses

By Social Small Biz on December 17, 2009

Does Twitter get you in a bit of a panic? For those just finding out what it is all about, the service can be a bit daunting with a vast array of different terminology to get your head around.

Here is our quick A to Z of all things Twitterific…

@reply – When you want to direct a message to someone in particular on Twitter you use an ‘@reply’. Your simply put the person’s Twitter ID at the start of your tweet with the ‘@’ sign

Bit.ly – This is one of the most popular URL shorteners (see more about these below)

Follow – When you want to see someone’s tweets in your stream, you ‘follow’ them using the button at the top of their profile

Follower – When someone starts to follow you on Twitter, they are called a ‘follower’

#followfriday – It is common on Twitter for people to tweet a list of recommended tweeters every Friday, using accompanied by the hashtag (see below) #ff or #followfriday

Hastag (#) – A hastag is a way to categorise or tag a tweet. Simply follow the message with a hashtag (#) and the tag it relates to, e.g. #christmas #election etc.

Lists – This is a feature on Twitter that allows you to create a group of tweeters that all have something in common. Lists can be viewed by anyone else

Retweet – A retweet is a function whereby you repeat or retweet someone else’s message because you agree with it or want to share it with your followers. This is often achieved by adding ‘RT’ and the person’s ID to the front of your retweet. Twitter has now introduced an automatic way to do this through Twitter.com

Tweet – A tweet is a message that you send on Twitter. It is limited to 140 characters

Tweetdeck – Tweetdeck is one of the best know third party applications. It allows you to manage multiple accounts and combines all the functionality of Twitter in one Dashboard. Seesmic, Hootsuite and Tweetie are other popular applications

Twitter.com – This is the main Twitter website where you can login in and manage your account, view your stream and send tweets

URL shorteners – Because tweets are limited to 140 characters it makes sharing really long links difficult. By using an alias URL you can shorten the link, e.g. http://www.socialsmallbiz.com/ would become http://bit.ly/8cDeEF. Most services shorten tweet automatically.

What else is there? What have we missed?

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