How to Use Twitter - A Visual Guide for Dancers

In this post, I'm including an introductory guide to how dancers can use Twitter, a popular social networking site. To follow along and experiment, you will probably want to create your own Twitter account.

A note about privacy. The screen shots below only feature publicly available content. If I follow a person on Twitter who locks their tweets (messages), I made sure that they did not show-up in the screen shots.

For almost all of the screen shots below, you can click on the images to see larger, more detailed pictures.

Visual Walk Through

When you are logged into your Twitter account, you are at your Twitter home page and you will see the latest Tweets from all of the people you follow on Twitter. This and the other screen shots below are from my account. What you will see on your Twitter home page will be different.

My profile or updates page is what people see when they visit my account at the following address: http://twitter.com/dancepinoy. On this page is a listing of all my recent tweets. You will want to promote the web address for your profile page to encourage people to follow you.

You can click on the "@Replies" link on the right-hand side of the page to see all of the tweets from people who publicly replied to you. If your Twitter name (@dougfox, in my case) is not the first word in a tweet, you will not see responses in the @Replies section.

The Twitter search engine is oddly not accessible from your main Twitter page. You have to go to the following address to conduct searches. You can search for any reference to your username (e.g., dougfox), which is a good idea since not all of the replies to your tweets will show-up in your @Replies page. Or, you can search for other key words such as a search I did for "dance technology" in the following example:

Creating and Responding to Tweets

At the top of your Twitter page, there is a message "What are you doing?" followed by a text box. You can enter your message of up to 140 characters into this box. This 140 character limit includes web addresses.

In the tweet I created immediately above, I included a short web address. If I included the regular URL for a post on my blog, it would be too long for Twitter. So I copied the URL from my blog page and visited Bit.ly. I pasted the long web address from my blog into the "Enter web address here" window and pushed the "Shorten" button (the "Shorten" button is not visible on the following screen shot--it's off to the right). A more compact URL was created for me, which I entered into my Tweet above. Here's a screen shot from Bit.ly:

If you read a tweet that you want to respond to, you can put your mouse over the tweet and, on the right side, you will see a semi-circular arrow curving in a counter-clockwise direction. Here's an example:


Once you click this reply button, the Twitter name of the person who you want to respond to is entered at the beginning of the message for you -- "@pinoyseoul" in this case without the quotation marks. It's important that there are no spaces between the "@" sign and the one-word Twitter name of the user. If you separate these two items, nobody will be notified when you tweet about them: After the person's Twitter name, you then write your message:


In addition to responding to a tweet from @clouddancefest, I can also retweet this message. Retweet means to copy somebody else's tweet and send it to your own network of followers on Twitter. The proper protocol for retweeting is to put a "RT" before the person's twitter name (e.g., RT @clouddancefest) and then include the original message after the person's twitter name. There is a space between the "RT" and the Twitter name. So in the following example, I've RT'd a tweet from @clouddance and sent it to my followers:

Have thoughts and recommendations about Twitter? Please share.