#twooc day one user guide february 2015

#twooc

@TrinityVisionUK 1 | P a g e

Welcome 12 Days of Twitter is a successful proven formula for learning Twitter and growing your network and online influence at the same time.

We hope that you will join in with the course, and know you will find much to tweet about, and build some successful relationships to help grow your business online.

This guide is the first of twelve you will receive on a daily basis – if you haven’t signed up yet please go to http://twooc.wordpress.com to secure your place, and ensure you get the course notes every day. We aim to make the learning practical, achievable and fun!

Twitter is changing all the time – for example during this course we expect the new feature to send video direct messages to up to twenty people will roll-out across your accounts – that’s why we edit the guides every day to include the latest features. You may find some of your own tweets included as screenshots - its all part of the fast lively nature of social networks, so hang on to your hat and enjoy!

If you have any questions or queries, don’t hesitate to contact the Twitter team. You can tweet us on @TrinityVisionUK, @LizCable or email Liz on [email protected].

Happy tweeting,

@LizCable

http://twooc.wordpress.com/

mailto:[email protected]

#twooc


How to join us . . . The 12 days of Twitter course runs consecutively over 12 days, and we will be live online to support you from 8am to 8pm each day. At first, it may seem difficult to find the time each day to login to Twitter, but stick with it, over the 12 days we will show you shortcuts, scheduling tools, and how to use mobile apps to make your time on Twitter more valuable and manageable. And the great news is that a lot of what you learn about Twitter, will be applicable to other social networks too.

“Throughout the course, when you tweet as part one of the course e-tivities add

“#twooc” to the end of your tweet.”

If you need support at any time you can either tweet our support team here on @TrinityVisionUK or @lizcable. There are also five students from Leeds Trinity University who will be helping you on your way, and are bravely learning in public, just like you. You’ll get to meet them all online.

Throughout the course, when you tweet as part one of the course e-tivities, add “#twooc” to the end of your tweet. Others on the course will then be able to find and follow the conversation.

Course outline

Sunday 1st February: Day 1: ‘Getting Dressed’ – Usernames and profiles

Monday 2nd February: Day 2: Find and Follow

Tuesday 3rd Febraury: Day 3: What to tweet and measuring success

Wednesday 4th February: Day 4: Etiquette and conversations

Thursday 5th February: Day 5: Monitoring for keywords and mentions

Friday 6th February: Day 6: Retweets and how to get tweeted

Saturday 7th February: Day 7: Beyond the tweet: multimedia tweeting

Sunday 8th February: Day 8: Mobile Twitter – how, why, who

Monday 9th February: Day 9: DMs, Favorites, and Advanced features

Tuesday 10th February: Day 10: Advanced Following strategies

Wednesday 11th February: Day 11: Syndicating to other platforms

Thursday 12th February: Day 12: Measurement & Return on Investment

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DAY 1: Outline

‘Getting Dressed’ – Usernames and profiles

Activity:

Following the instructions on pages 4 – 18:

Join Twitter

Choose an appropriate Username

Upload a Photograph

Follow @lizcable and @TrinityVisionUK

Create your Biography

Add your Location

Add a link to your Website

Tools:

www.mypictr.com – for editing, resizing and reformating pictures on the fly.

www.namechk.com – for discovering the availabilty of usernames across numerous social platforms.

Resources:

http:/blog.Twitter.com – All the latest Twitter news, fresh from the source.

http://www.mypictr.com/

http://www.namechk.com/

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How to join Twitter

We recommend joing Twitter on a desktop browser rather than through the mobile app. The app has a limited set of features, so best to use the browser version when working on your profile.

Go to http://Twitter.com. Sign up to Twitter on this front page as highlighted below.

In the first box (under where it says ‘sign up’) type your full name

In the second box type your e-mail address

In the third box type a password, this can be anything you choose, but make sure it is memorable

Finally click the ‘Sign up for Twitter’ button.

You are now presented with the ‘Join Twitter’ screen, and this is where it could get a bit tricky. You need to

choose a username:

http://twitter.com/

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How to Choose a Username

Your username, or Twitter ID, can be a maximum of 15 characters long, however, making it as short as possible

helps it to be memorable, and also means you have more room in your tweets for your marketing message.

This is especially important when it comes to re-tweeting, which we’ll explain on Day 6.

You can change your username in the future, but it’s best to see if you can get it right first time, as it can

confuse your followers. So how do you choose a username?

Firstly, each username is unique, so Twitter won’t let you choose one which is already in use.

People relate to other people better than they do to brands or company names, so if you are a self-employed

professional, an author or academic, or the CEO of your organisation, definitely consider using your own name.

Avoid using numbers, hyphens and underscores as this will make it harder for people to be able to search and

find you online. It’s also almost impossible to remember.

You might also want to ensure that your social identity is consistent across all social media platforms – it makes

it easier for your customers to find you as they only have to remember one username. It also makes it easy for

search engines to aggregate your social content into one recognisable stream.

There’s a funky tool called http://namechk.com/ that allows you to test out a username and see if it’s available

across multiple platforms. They say:

“Check to see if your desired username or vanity URL is still available at dozens of popular Social Networking

and Social Bookmarking websites. Promote your brand consistently by registering a username that is still

available on the majority of the most popular sites.”

You can see that the majority of profiles on platforms including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have

“myairchair” available as a user name, but it's not available on Pinterest and DailyBooth. Once you have chosen

your Username click the ‘Create my account’ button. You ideally want one that’s available on Facebook,

LinkedIn, Twitter, Wordpress, YouTube and Flickr at the least.

NOTE: Usernames are not case sensitive, but the convention is to capitalise for ease of reading.

http://namechk.com/

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Account Security

In order to ensure that your Twitter account is secure, Twitter will ask you to verifiy your account with a phone

number, select your country/region and then type your phone number into the second box. Then click “Verify

phone number”.

After entering your phone number you will receive a text message from Twitter with your verification code,

simply enter the verification code into the box and click “Verify the code”.

Congratulations!

You now have your very own Twitter account.

We believe in getting dressed before going networking and inviting people to view your profile, so we’re going

to skip the next couple of steps, and come back to them when your profile has been perfected:

So...

Your welcome screen will now appear, just click ‘Lets go!’ to get started.

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On the “What are you interested in?” screen, just click the ‘Skip this step’ button at the bottom left of the page.

If the ‘skip this step’ option isn’t there (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t!) you can select as many of the

options listed that you are interested in. Twitter will use these interests to suggests accounts of interest to

you in the next step.

Twitter will suggest 40 different accounts for you to follow based on the interests that you selected on the

previous step. These will often be popular celebrity accounts, but don’t worry if you don’t want to follow any of

these accounts click on the cross next to the account.

You can always follow them now and then unfollow them later, that’s easy.

Once you’ve looked through the suggestions and selected the accounts you want to follow click “Follow &

continue” on the top right of your screen.

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On the “Customize your profile screen”, click the ‘Skip’ button at the bottom left of the page. We will focus on

this section later.

On the ‘Find People You Know’ screen, click the ‘Skip’ button at the bottom of the page.

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Once you’ve taken/skipped those steps, you will be presented with the Twitter dashboard as you see it for the

first time:

In the main panel at the top and on the left hand menu, you can see that Twitter makes some suggestions for

people to follow, often popular celebrity accounts or other accounts based on accounts you already follow.

Take a quick detour to your emails (the account you used to create your Twitter ID) and find your

confirmation email. Click on the link in that email to verify your account and this will ensure you can use all

the features of Twitter fully.

Once you’ve clicked on the confirmation link it will send you back to the Twitter dashboard.

Now first of all, we recommend that you follow us, so that you can read all our tweets in your timeline. To do

this you type: @TrinityVisionUK in the box that says “Search” then press the Enter key.

This brings up a list of tweets and users, with us at the top (hopefully!):

#twooc


Click on the [Follow] button, and it changes to a happy blue ‘Following’ button to show you are following us.

When you hover on it, it becomes an angry red ‘unfollow’ button to show that you can unfollow us. Click it a

few times to see that Twitter’s quite fast.

You can also go direct to anyone’s profile using their URL (Universal Resource Locator) to your browser’s

address bar. E.g. http:www.twitter.com/trinityVisionUK

And you can follow/unfollow from there, too.

Make sure you leave the button looking like this. >

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Now, If you want to unfollow those accounts that Twitter made you follow when you registered, click on the

home button in the top left hand corner to go to your own profile, and then click on Following:

This will bring up summary boxes of all of the Twitter accounts that you already follow.

From there, if you hover over the button that says ‘Following’ it will turn red and say ‘Unfollow’ then you can

click the button to unfollow that user.

You will know you have clicked it and unfollowed them as the button will be left looking like this -

If you like, you can see if any of your friends are on Twitter using the [Search] field, but we recommend waiting

to follow users until after we’ve done the next bit. . . . Perfecting your Profile.

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Who Am I?

I’m asked time and again “What do I tweet about?” Everyone is aware of the rogue tweeters who discuss what

flavour coffee they’re drinking, and other banalities of the day. We’re all agreed, we don’t want to follow these

people, and we certainly don’t want to be them. “What do I tweet about?” is a question we’ll be revisiting over

the next few days – and hopefully answering quite thoroughly.

To start with, you need to think about why you are on Twitter at all, and what you want to get out of it. Do you

know why you are here?

Do you want to follow celebrities and indulge in gossip about their private lives?

Do you want to follow breaking world news stories?

Do you want to find out what’s going on in your local music scene?

Do you want to moan about your family life and look for sympathy?

Do you want to indulge your passion for bird-watching/knitting/scuba-diving?

Do you want to find people who may be interested in doing business with you?

Twitter can be used for all of these things (though not very successfully all at the same time). So what do you

want to do with it?

On Twitter, you really do attract what you put out there, as every word you put in your profile will be used by

others to seek you out using profile searching tools, and once they have found you, to decide whether they will

follow you. So people will judge you by your profile and your tweets and will choose whether to “tune in” and

listen to more, or to walk on by.

So you need to be very clear who it is you want to attract to your profile and encourage to follow you and talk

to you, and what words you need to be using to attract them. There’s room for personality, of course, but

we’re here to put Twitter into action for business, so this is your professional persona that we want your profile

to represent.

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Your Twitter Profile:

Your Twitter Bio

On Twitter you get 160 characters (including punctuation and spaces) to describe who you are and/or who you

want to meet and/or why people should follow you. On page 14 you can see some examples – you’ll notice

that the bigger the name, the shorter the Bio. That’s because they don’t need to use keywords to get found.

But you do. Make your biography interesting and friendly, but make sure you get some keywords in there too.

Notice that there is a separate location field, so you don’t need to put geographical data in your Bio.

You’ve got 160 characters, so get creative!

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Surprise! @TillaBrook ;)

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Your Twitter Picture

A picture says a thousand words, and as you only get 140 characters in a tweet, and 160 in a bio, your picture is

going to be a big part of your first impression on Twitter.

Research shows that 64% more people will connect with you if you have a photograph - 12%

more than that if you are smiling and making eye contact with the camera. Certainly, you don’t

want the default coloured egg that tells everyone you really don’t care:

You may think it’s more appropriate to have a logo for your profile picture, or a cartoon. Have a look at the

ones on page 14, and see what appeals to you. Who would you follow, and why? How much does the picture

influence you?

Resizing secrets

If you have a great photo or logo, but it’s the wrong size for Twitter, here’s another useful tool that will help.

Simply upload your photo to http://www.mypictr.com, and zoom in, crop and resize. You can download the

resulting perfect photo.

You need to create a square picture of 400 x 400 pixels (Ignore the fact that mypictr thinks Twitter photos are

48x48 pixels, trust me, 120x120 will work and fill your profile photo frame.) Your picture is tiny enough online,

without making it so miniscule it’s unrecognisable.

Bearing in mind over two thirds of people who access social networks do so on a mobile or tablet device, you

need your face to be as recognisable as possible.

Ready to upload your photo?

Make sure the photo you want to use is saved on the computer you are using.

Make sure the photo you want to use is saved on the computer you are using. Then, from the ‘Home’ page,

click on “Add an avatar” in the top left next to your name, then select “upload photo”


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A pop up will then appear, you can then search through your files and upload a photo. Once you have found

the photo you want select the image and click “open”.

Sometimes it takes a little while for your photo to appear on Twitter – it may stay as an egg for a while before

Twitter has caught up with itself.

You will notice you can also add a header image for your profile. This is very similar in style to cover photos on

Facebok timeline pages. The recommended size for this image is 1500x500 pixels. Again you can use

http://www.mypictr.com to crop and resize your image.

Your header photo is only seen on your profile page, unlike your profile photo which will appear in user

timelines. If you don’t have an image you feel suitable right now, don’t worry you can always come back and

add one later on.

Here’s Trinity Visions header:


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Your Twitter Profile

From the ‘Home’ page, again if you click on your avatar icon on the top right a drop down menu will appear,

from this you will be able to select ‘settings’, you will be able to edit your profile by selecting ‘Settings.’

Explore the other menus on the left hand panel, in settings you can change the profile thee, password and

other security settings. Explore the other menus on the left hand panel. When you have finished go to your

profile and in the top left select ‘Edit profile’

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Location, Location, Location

The location field is important if you are creating a business account and your business serves a particular area.

You can put a list of towns, but you only get 30 characters in total, and naming more than one town will restrict

how easily you can be found and ranked by location specific search tools. I would consider adding UK for a UK

based company, simply to improve visibility and relevance in searches.

Website

If you don’t have a website, consider sending visitors to your LinkedIn profile instead, or perhaps your

Facebook page.

Later on, we’ll show you how you can create trackable links, and then you can see how many people click on

this link on your profile page, and you’ll be able to measure the traffic that your profiles bring you. But that’s

enough for one day.

We’ll close it there and until tomorrow . . .

Happy tweeting!

@lizcable & @TrinityVisionUK

#twooc day one user guide february 2015

Documents

g e day

days of twitter course

learning twitter

course outline

course etivities

mobile twitter

twitter team

g e welcome