Twitter can be confusing to the newly tweeted. Sometimes you almost feel like you need to learn a second language to keep up.

In this post, I’ll cover the most important things so you know what’s going on in your Twitter stream.

1. @faketwitterhandle

When you see an “@” followed by stuff, it’s a Twitter handle. Mine, for example, is @1to1Discovery. The handle is clickable and will take you to his or her profile on Twitter. Useful for finding new people to follow or to see who is talking about your friends.

2. RT

RT is a “retweet,” which is simply sharing someone else’s tweet. It will show up like this:

RT @1to1Discovery A new blog post on twitter lingo. http://totallyfake link.com

Let me break that down.

–RT means Retweet
–@1to1Discovery is the twitter handle of the person who created the original tweet (like I just talked about above).
–The link is just that, a link to something the retweeter thought might be of interest to his or her followers

3. # (hashtag)

This is one of the most confusing things to new tweeters. A hashtag is just a way of grouping tweets about a similar subject. For example, if you are holding an event (like CBP’s every Friday #tweetmeet), you will use the hashtag. Then anyone who is interested in that topic/event/silly thing can search for that tag and see everyone else who is tweeting about it.

Fair warning. Sometimes people use a hashtag as a way of getting across an emotion, feeling or opinion. For example, last week I responded to someone’s tweet about remembering when you had to wait for a TV to warm up. I closed with #feelingdatednow. That’s not a real hashtag (I don’t think). Just me being a smart aleck.

Warning! Hashtags show up in your stream as something you can click. It’s not a link. Clicking on it will bring up other tweets using the same hashtag.

4. Short URLs

Most of the clickable links in a tweet are short and non-descriptive and look something like http://bit.ly/f8ke.

URL shorteners are used for a couple of reasons. The better ones have statistics so you can see how many people clicked on the link. They are also used because, well, with only 140 characters, you don’t want to waste your precious space on http://1to1discovery/what-is-this-blog-post-about-anyway.

Those are the four most common confusing things you’ll see on Twitter. But, if you have any others you’ve seen, mention them in the comments, and I’ll define them. The downside of not being new to Twitter is that it all makes sense to me, and I might be missing an obvious one.

Tags: communication, social media

This entry was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 8:43 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.