For new Twitter users, understanding Twitter and how to use it may change in those first few days after signing up. It could mean working through the learning curve or it could mean too much frustration to continue. Some people stay, others move on, realizing Twitter wasn’t for them. I know of some people, including me, who stopped using Twitter but came back and tried it again to find out they really enjoyed it. The problem is, as with many things in life, there is a learning curve. I want to offer three important steps to surviving the Twitter learning curve.

Locate
If you’re particular about who you want in your friend and follow lists, finding people you want to follow can be a bit tricky. It’s relatively easy to amass followers by following them and hoping most of them will follow you back. But most of these type of followers will probably be people who will never communicate with you. And you probably won’t receive a shout out from anyone in the top 500 rankings, either. See Twitterholic. Here are some basic ways of finding people with whom to network:

• Try Twitter tools like Twubble or Twellow to help find people with interests similar to your own. TweeterTags is a new tool that allows you to tag yourself with your interests and also find people with similar tags.
• My interests are in writing, blogging, and social networking, so I look for people with similar interests. My preferred method to find people is simply using Twitter itself and look up my favorite and respected friends to see who is following them.

Communicate
The obvious principle behind Twitter is communication, but sometimes it’s hard to feel engaged in the medium when you send out a tweet, @Reply, or DM and no one responds. At first Twitter can seem like a black hole and conversations may be more one-sided with people in your network. But it won’t always feel that way, and here are some reasons why:

• You will find friends who have things to say that interest you and provoke a response (It’s hard to become engaged when you don’t care what is being said).
• You will learn how to tweet messages that are interesting and evoke a response.
• People will begin to engage in conversation with you over something you tweeted.
• People will retweet your tweets, and you will think, hey, I really made an impression!
• You will become comfortable with the format and enter into more and more conversations.
• You will find your favorite tools for making Twitter fun and easy to use. My favorites for the communication part of Twitter are TweetDeck and Seesmic. A key function in their design is to help you manage your friends and followers groups, which makes conversations a snap.

Negotiate
Managing our lives requires negotiation. Relationships require negotiation. Using Twitter requires some level of negotiation on how to fit it into your lifestyle and schedule. Here are some ideas to keep in mind when negotiating the Twitterverse.

• Don’t feel you are locked in to your game plan for using Twitter. If you want to build a big follower base, change the way you do business. If you realize having thousands of followers is not what you really want out of Twitter, feel free to change your goals and strategy.
• Don’t feel you can’t unfollow someone. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. For instance, if you don’t like the comments from a particular individual, hit the unfollow button. Poof!
• Don’t feel you have to follow everyone who follows you. Sure, an etiquette about following back has developed, but if it doesn’t apply to how you want to use Twitter, don’t follow back.
• Don’t feel you have to respond immediately, or ever, if someone sends you a message or reply. You only have so much time and you can only do so much in a day. Time, friends, followers, etc. all enter into your negotiation.
• Sometimes followers leave. If they do and you’re no longer interested in following them, you can certainly unfollow. Applications like Tweetlater will even auto unfollow if that’s something you choose to do. No need to take it personally.

As a new user, understanding and using Twitter can seem overwhelming. It can be frustrating, it can even feel depressing. And you may decided it’s not for you. But remember that these are sometimes symptoms of working through a learning curve. Ultimately Twitter becomes how you re-invent it for yourself.

My Twitter Learning Curve graph from TwitterCounter

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Surviving the Twitter Learning Curve

Tweetbeep is a free web-based service that lets you get notified via e-mail whenever someone mentions a word, name or phrase on Twitter. Find out immediately when someone tweets (posts) your name, company, or website address on Twitter, even if they use a URL-shortening service like TinyURL.

Step 1: Signing Up for Tweetbeep

Getting started with Tweetbeep is as easy as filling out a simple form right on the first page of tweetbeep.com. Enter any username you want for the first field – the last one is for your Twitter username.

The first page of Tweetbeep.com lets you
create your account instantly.

Once you’ve pressed the Submit button, you’ll be taken to a page where you can customize just about anything regarding the notification(s) you want to receive.

Step 2: Creating a New Alert

Your first choice is whether or not you want to be notified when a certain word is used (Keyword) or when someone links to your website (Link to Domain). Keep in mind that you can create an alert for both items if you want (so you could be notified whenever someone uses the word TwiTip as well as TwiTip.com)

Let’s say we want to start with a Keyword alert. Type the word or phrase you want to be notified about and decide whether you want Tweetbeep to notify you hourly or daily if it finds a match.

Step 3: Set Your Options

The checkbox “only if includes URL” is usually for notifications that mention your site name and the URL – such as “Visit TwiTip at www.twitip.com for great Twitter tips”. Unchecking this will notify you only if someone uses the word and not the web address.

The checkbox for “search only text, not @reply name” is ideal if the word or phrase you want to be alerted for happens to be a common word or name. So if you want to be notified whenever someone searches for Twitter tips, but doesn’t have the word “twitter” in their username, you’d want to keep that box checked.

You can also choose what words to have Tweetbeep ignore, only be notified of a certain twitter user posts something with your name or company in it, or even narrow down posts to a certain geographic area. Once you’ve got your options set, it’s time to click Save Alert.

Step 4: Rinse and Repeat!

Once you save the alert, it will show up in your Tweetbeep account and you’ll get an email any time that word or phrase is used (depending on the options you set). You can then create more alerts if you’d like.

The simple user menu on the left side of every page lets you view (and optionally delete) alerts you’ve created, update your profile (change your password or update your email address) and logout.

Now you no longer have to check Twitter compulsively to see who’s talking about you or your company. Let Tweetbeep bring the notifications to you!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Tweetbeep for Beginners: Get Custom Twitter Alerts in Your Email

Monitter is a tracking tool for Twitter that enables you to enter multiple keywords that you want to monitor and then to watch any tweets that mention these words in real time.

Here’s how it looks with four words that I just plugged in (click to enlarge):

Potential Uses for Monitter

While there are other tools around that track keywords there is a lot to like about Monitter and I could see it being useful for many applications such as:

Vanity watching – you can see that two of the words that I’ve entered are ‘problogger’ and ‘twitip’ – words that are associated with my brand. Watching words like these are important if you’re interested in monitoring what people are saying about you and your business, brand, products etc.

Networking – interested in networking with people talking about a topic that you’re interested in? Enter a keyword associated with that topic and watch who is using the word. It might take you a while to find the right word (for example my ‘twitter’ column is updating so fast I can’t keep up.

Business Opportunities – I write a blog about digital cameras and how to use them. When I enter the word ‘digital camera’ I’m immediately tapping into the conversations of thousands of people talking about their cameras. Already in watching those keywords I can see people talking about how their cameras don’t work, asking how to use certain featured etc. A smart business would be using tools like this to interact with those people.

Enlarging Your Twitter Community – I just did a quick experiment and added the words “first tweet’ to a column. Within seconds I saw 10 people leaving their first ever Twitter entries. All it took was me to reply to them with a ‘welcome to Twitter’ and to follow them and I had three new friends.

I’m certain that there are many other ways of using a keyword monitoring tool like Monitter – I’d like to hear how you use them (and what other tools you use).

Monitter Features

• Monitter by Location – in the top left corner you can add a location and specify a distance from that location that you want to monitor tweets from.
• Language – in the bottom left corner you can switch to a number of languages
• Add Keywords – in the bottom right corner you can add or subtract columns to monitor.
• RSS – want to monitor keywords via RSS instead of on the Monitter website – no problem – once you’ve added a keyword you’re given an RSS feed for that word.
• Widgets for Your Website – want to show your blog or website reader what people are tweeting about a keyword? There’s a widget tool that enables you to add real time monitoring of keywords to your site.
• Advanced Search - you can search for @problogger to find references to a twitter user, “enclose your search in quotes” for exact phrases, search for one term OR another, search for terms mentioned with links and more (see the ‘help’ link in the right hand navigation area.

One thing that I’d like to see added to Monitter would be the ability to reply somehow from within the page. At the moment when you hit reply you’re taken to Twitter to reply.

Overall I think this could be a useful tool. I won’t use it all the time but I think it’d be particularly useful during a conference or when lauching a project.

Interested to hear what others think of Monitter and how you’d use it.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Monitter – Real Time Keyword Monitoring of Twitter