Want to use Twitter but don’t know where to start or how to get involved?

July 9th, 2009 by Heidi

Everyone’s twittering, why aren’t you??  Do you feel that way?

Getting started with twitter is probably the hardest part of twittering.   When you twitter you want someone to listen (your followers) and want to hear the conversation of others (who you follow.)    When you first sign up for twitter it is like standing in the middle of group of strangers and you hear random comments and no one can hear your comments.  So you need to increase your followers and follow people but how?

Here’s my simple way..

1. First figure out what interests you.  Hobbie:  Scrapbooking?  Gardening?  Technology:  Wordpress? etc…
2. Many people twitter on a certain subject they use hash tags.  It’s like labeling the twitter comment with a subject.  There are tons of hashtags but try find a hash tag for  one or a few of the interests above.  Here’s a great site for doing that.  hashtags.org    A hint is digital scrapbookers are using #digiscrap for their hashtag.
3. Now search for that #hashtag at search.twitter.com and listen to the conversation.
4. As you see people twittering about things that interest you..  Follow  them.  Click on their name and click Follow.   Keep doing that and you gain people to listen to in your own “conversation stream.”
5. Now to get followers, start talking about things that interest you.  People will start following you if they like your content.  If you don’t twitter you won’t increase your followers. 
6. In addition, follow your followers and see what they have to say.  (Be careful though, some are just spewing junk.  Unfollow the bad ones..) 

Now there are other ways..  but I think with my method, you get a nice conversation to follow on subjects that interest you.

One of the other ways to find friends is using Twitter directories:   feel free to read about them some of them: Find ‘Em On Twitter: 15 Twitter Directories Compared and here:  14 Twitter directories to find new friends