Now that you have a profile and have scoured the site for your buddies you need to have some idea about that everyone is tweeting about and what you can do to make it easier to find those tweets.

By now you have figured out how difficult it can be to limit your characters when you are tweeting. It makes most of us work to convey a thought in a simple straight forward way. No fancy prose, no lengthy poetry.

One of the tools you can use to shorten your post is http://tinyurl.com. Say you want t o share a blog post from your favorite writers or a link to a great site you just found, but by the time you include the link you have six characters left- not enough room to explain what you are sharing.  Copy and paste the URL into the little window on the tinyurl site and it will make it smaller for you.

Twitter Applications:

There are a few cool applications that aggregate (pull together and organize in one place) Twitter posts. It’s fine if you just want to log in to Twitter.com and see what’s going on but with these applications you can see more at one time.

My personal favorite is http://Tweetdeck.com because you can see a tweet stream that updates on it’s own (no need to refresh the page), a stream of @ replys, a stream of direct messages and then you can use it to search too. There are some instructions on their site but just playing with it is the easiest way to figure it out.  This is a desktop application you have to download along with Adobe Air.

The web-based application you can use is http://hootsuitecom (no downloading) because I can run multiple Twitter profiles at one time. It allows you to tweet to more than one account at a time. This is great if you have a profile for your business, group, blog, and then one for you personally.

Most of these applications have a tool built in to shorten urls with, so there is an added bonus!  There are a million other applications you can use to manage your tweets, followers and all of them have different features-it’s up to you to find the one you like the most!

#Hashtags
One of the things you will see on Twitter is a cryptic set of symbols and letters show up here and there. 
Like this: @Hallock If a person kills their clone is it murder or suicide? #ponder

It took me while to dig up the explanation for the # before a certain word, but it comes down to watching what others are tweeting. I could go into great detail about this subject but someone already has http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Hashtags That page includes a complete explanation plus links to the #hashtag search pages.

On the last post we had some tips from a Social Media Strategist. Here they are:
Lingo: When twitter encounters a problem you’ll get the FAIL WHALE Screen. Now, it’s become urban slang for any time someone screws up…

Twitter Don’t (s)
- Don’t just post a bunch of links to buy your stuff or get us to visit your blog (FAIL)
- Don’t be on a mission to get followers and just talk about yourself all day (FAIL)
- Don’t get a bunch of followers and never follow anyone back (FAIL).

The last thing I want to tell you about is the Tweet-up. This is a gathering of people in a certain geographical area who are on twitter. We do these every month at Office Space Co-Working (@cowork_akron) in downtown Akron. We get to meet face to face and of course we all bring our laptops and tweet about it!
So if you see that term show in a tweet up you will know you can attend-since most tweetup’s are open to the Twitter public!

Questions class?