As part of our ongoing Twitter education leading up to Celebration, I thought I’d share with you some of the more interesting things you can do on Twitter to share information. Since we’re hoping more and more of you start using the service, particularly at Celebration, these are some of the easy tricks you can use to get more out of it.
Besides just sharing 140 characters of text, you can also share your location, photos and videos on Twitter. For example, if someone posts their location, (using the Twitter app’s location service, or some other third party site like Gowalla.com or Foursquare.com,) the post will have a little symbol next to it like this:
If you click on that symbol, you can get more information on where that person is. This will pop up on the right side of your screen:
This can be useful if someone is posting about an event you might want to find around town.
But let’s say someone posted a picture. In that case, you’ll see a symbol next to the tweet that looks like this:
It’s in the same place as the location, but looks just a little different, right? If you click on that…
…it opens up the image on the right side of your screen again. You also see the original post, and the bio of any other twitter member mentioned in that post – In this case, Brian.
If you post a video from YouTube or Vimeo.com, there’s another symbol that appears next to the tweet, looking like this:
As you probably, guessed, clicking on that symbol pops the video out on the side of the page.
But you can also click on the date of the post – see that “14 Apr” down there? If you click on that instead…
…Twitter pops out the entire post, with the video, as it’s own page. And the same works for the location and photo stuff too – click on the time of the post, and it blows everything out for you.
I tell you all this for three reasons. First, this is all built into Twitter, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of it.
Second, using these built-in tools will increase your enjoyment of Twitter, which will keep you using Twitter. I won’t lie to you, Twitter is an important tool for broadcasting your message. But if you don’t enjoy using it, you won’t post things people want to read or see. When you get into what you can do on Twitter, you share more that is interesting. The more interesting your content, the more people you’ll have listening to you.
Finally, other people know how to use these tools as well – so Twitter becomes a great place to share this kind of information with your own followers. If you post videos or pictures while you’re at Celebration, you can bet other people around you will be able to see them. So why not go for it? Don’t just type quick tweets about how you’re going in to see breakout session with Dr. Anderson – send us all your pic of what was going on there.
When there is so much potential traffic on Twitter, and it costs you nothing, why wouldn’t you take advantage of it?
