Learning The Twitter Lingo

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No doubt about it Twitter has become a fierce little creature since its birth a few years back. An entire industry has spawned around this website and the amount of new applications, websites and physical companies that have been born due to the success of this social community has been rather amazing to watch. One thing that has occurred with the success of this site is a tremendous amount of website lingo that some people still have a hard time remembering or even understanding.

Twitter has a guide on their website for the entire Twitter lingo collection but we have decided to put it all in here for you.

Following

Every user and account has the ability to follow other users on Twitter. When you follow another user you automatically see all their communication efforts in your wall stream allowing you to use a variety of Twitter features to further communicate with that particular user. You can either push that message further or respond back to that user regarding that specific message.

Tweet

To “tweet” is actually the process of using the communication tool and post something on your wall stream. Every time you decided to post a message into the communication stream you are “tweeting” something. Exciting huh?

@username

The @username feature allows you to communicate with other users for everyone else to see. If you want to send someone a public message rather than a direct message no one sees you would use the @ symbol followed by their username and it would ping the other users account letting them know you are trying to communicate with them publicly. You can include more than one user in any given communication attempt.

Direct Message

A direct message is when you send a specific user a private message that nobody can see but that user only. This acts as a private messaging tool built in directly to the Twitter platform. Once you send the DM or direct message that user will be notified on their end that they have received a message in their account. Sort of like an email!

Retweet

Retweet is very popular simply because it is one of the features that make this platform such a community driven instrument. If you see a tweet that someone else posted and you think your audience would benefit from reading that tweet you can retweet it so that your followers can read it as well. If you are a business or a person with an account it is good to retweet other wall posts once in a while because after all it is a community and that’s what communities do.

Hashtag (#)

A hashtag is where you can ping certain keywords or topics in your tweets so they have a better way to be categorized. It gives your tweet a better chance to appear in Twitter searches for when someone search for that particular topic. Place the hashtag before a certain keyword and give it a little bit of extra strength in the communication stream.

There are a few other words and lingo the community will use to refer to various acts and communication efforts but I think for a beginner just wanting to learn these will be the most important  to understand.