Monday Marketing Minute #45 Twitter Demystified Series Follow Up -

This is the Follow Up to the series of 10 MM Minutes about Demystifying Twitter.

InA strong brand is invaluable to artists. Twitter is one of the quickest ways to build brand recognition for you and your art business. A strong and recognizable creative brand is invaluable to an artist and serves to communicate credibility to your prospective collectors and buyers and other artists as well.

We have learned all the basics and then some. Now there were a few things I wanted to add to the series that will clarify and give added value to you:

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a very useful application for managing Twitter and your tweets. It is pretty user friendly and intuitive for frequent social media users. However, some are intimidated by it. It has tooltip-type hints when you mouse over the buttons For those of you who want more than tooltips, here is a good Basic introduction to TweetDeck by Your Blog Helper.

Messages, @Replies, etc.

Get ‘em straight! Use ‘em right!

One of the things that really confused me about Twitter at first was how to communicate with another user. I could RT easy enough, but how did I reply or privately message someone?

@Replies

@replies are conversations in Twitter. By correctly using @replies, you can interact with other Twitter users publicly, in a way that’s effective…and might get you new followers.

An @reply (pronounced at reply) is a public communication to a specific person on Twitter. You use an @reply when you want to reply to a tweet made by another Twitter user. Your @reply is public, meaning it appears on the Timeline and it could appear to your followers, depending on how their @reply notices are set. The @reply must begin with the @ symbol followed immediately (with no space) by the Twitter user you’re replying to. If it’s buried within the tweet, it won’t go onto the recipient’s @Replies page.

So, for example, an @reply to me would look something like this when composed:

@RebeccaEParsons Loved the Twitter Demystified Series!!!

@Mention

A mention is a Twitter update that contains @username anywhere in the body of the Tweet. (Yes, replies are also considered mentions.) Twitter collect these messages, as well as all your replies, in the @Mentions tab on your homepage. If you include more than one person’s name in your update and you use the @username format, those people will all see the update in their personal mentions tab.

To post a mention on Twitter, type your message normally, but replace any names you include with @username (Twitter username). People will see any mentions posted by someone they follow (all mentions are treated like regular Tweets).

Message (formerly called a Direct Message DM)

A Message (previously called a Direct Message) is a private message sent via Twitter to one of your followers. (This is different than mentions and @replies.) In turn, people you follow can send you a private message. You cannot send a direct message to a user who is not following you.

In your Twitter account you click the “Messages” button on the top menu bar of your page. You land on a page showing your private message history. To send a message, click the “New Message” button. A pop-up box appears where you type the @name of the person you wish to talk to and type the message. Click “Send.”

Tip: Make sure that user follows you. You may only send a direct message to your followers.

DMs do not appear in the public timeline. They only appear in the sender’s and recipient’s Messages page. They’re on the sender’s Sent tab and the recipients Inbox tab:

CAUTION: DMs are private, but they’re not secure. Don’t use DMs (or any other online communication method, for that matter) to share personal content you must keep private!

#Hashtags (“#” Symbols)

The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It is the way to categorize Tweets. People use the hashtag symbol # before relevant keywords in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets to show more easily in Twitter Search. If you click on a hashtagged word all the Tweets in that category appear. A hashtags can be placed anywhere in your Tweet. Hashtagged words that become very popular are often Trending Topics.

I am loving the #art of @RebeccaEParsons

Further Discovery and Reading

The third party site hashtags.org offers an overview of popular hashtags used on Twitter. Find out about trends, look at small, pretty graphs, and search to see if the hashtags of your fantasies exist.
You may also want to read this article about hashtags, which appeared in The New Yorker magazine.