Twitter 101

Twitter has exploded. There are a lot of new users or users who don't really understand the basics of the social network, so here are a few common misconceptions or misunderstood aspects of Twitter for your viewing pleasure:

1) Starting a tweet with "@username" will not be seen by a lot of your followers.

I've learned over the past year or so that not many people know this. Starting a tweet with "@username" is meant to be a reply to someone, so the only people who will see the tweet in their timeline are the people following both you and the person you are tweeting at. If you didn't know that then you're not alone; some social networking managers for large companies don't even know this. Take for instance ESPN's College Game Day account that has more than 200,000 followers. The following tweet from a few months back is an example of what I am talking about:

Chris Fowler has around 125,000 followers. Based on those numbers alone, that means that at least 75,000 people following College Game Day didn't see that tweet, and that would only be if all 125k of Fowler's followers were following CGD as well. So if you really want to start a tweet with someone's username when it's not a reply, put a punctuation mark before it so that it's visible to all of your followers.

2) Don't beg celebrities for a retweet.

Why? Why do people do this? Do you get win something for getting retweeted by begging? Scott Van Pelt seems to wonder the same thing:

3) If you're a celebrity, don't retweet people begging for retweets.

If celebrities didn't oblige the beggers by retweeting them, then I wouldn't have had to make rule #2. You didn't get 1,000,000+ followers because everyone wanted to read all the tweets from people begging you for retweets.

Riley Cooper poked fun at the retweet beggers a while back after Chandler Parsons had retweeted a few people:

Ok, now back to actual Twitter rules.

4) If you have your tweets protected, no one else can read them unless you approved them to follow you, even if you include a username in the tweet.

I don't really understand why someone would lock their tweets in the first place, but I'm not going to discuss that. Basically, if you're a preteen girl who's parents allowed you to have a twitter account as long as it is protected, all of your tweets at Justin Bieber are going unnoticed by him not because he's ignoring you, but because your tweets are protected and he can't see them. Likewise, if you're not a preteen girl, the same rules apply. If your tweets are protected and you decide to ask a reporter like Adam Schefter a question about your team, he won't be able to see it which obviously means you won't be getting an answer.

5) You can't retweet locked accounts.

This is against the Twitter Terms of Service, which is yet another part of Twitter that users with protected tweets miss out on.

6) You can tweet via text messages.

Sending an SMS to 40404 will tweet from your account as long as you added your number to the settings. That means that if you are without a smartphone you can still tweet on the go.

7) If you have an iPhone, Tweetbot rules all.

Don't ask questions. If you use Twitter on your iPhone, then you need to be using Tweetbot. That is all.