Twitter me!

I'm starting to see more people use Twitter. You are only allowed 140 characters, but that keeps the conversations brief. It allows you to put up a favorite website you just saw or maybe tell a little about your day. There are some great thinkers on there that disperse a lot of good advice in those few words. It really gives you a chance to connect with others, similar to a chat room, but it seems to go beyond that. I think some of this may come from the easy ability to use it with your cell phone.

You can follow some of my feed, or click on follow me, on the right side of this blog.

Here are some of the basics.

Use @username when responding to people. mine is @chadpil.

RT which means Retweet when you send something that someone else sends that you are sending again. So if you thought what I just said here was interesting and you wanted to send it to your audience type RT @chadpil Hard to believe networking goes on off of the computer anymore, huh?

D username will send a direct message to someone who is following you. "D ChadPil How is your day"

There are also a couple groups out there. When you want to keep everything on a topic. #wedchat and #apad are a couple groups. THey use # in front of their name.

One way to find people is to read what they are writing and start following people who look interesting You can search for #apad and find everything on that topic. Check out http://search.twitter.com/

You don't have to follow everyone back that follows you. I just follow the people who look interesting. I use a program called Tweetdeck (I think it's at Tweetdeck.com) and it's great for organizing your different social groups (I have one for triathlons, one for marketing and one for weddings and so on).

And if this wasn't enough for you, check out http://help.twitter.com/portal They have a ton more tips and tricks! You can learn there what STATS, FAV, GET etc does.