Dane of War’s Guide to Twitter

Whether you are familiar with Twitter or you are just starting to learn what a great networking tool it is, you really need to know how it works to communicate well and make use of its potential. People use Twitter for many things, but the same “rules” should apply for everyone. Twitter misuse is not at all uncommon and even the experienced twitterers (myself included, from time to time) often don’t follow good netiquette.

Twitter terminology

The retweet (or “RT”) allows Twitter users to share the best links and tweets they find from others using the service.

The DM (or “Direct Message”) allows you to send a message that is sent privately to the specified Twitter user. Note: you can only send DMs to people who are following you.

The hashtag is a topic with a hash symbol (“#”) at the start to identify it. Twitter hashtags help spread information on Twitter while also helping to organize it.

The @ sign is how you reply to someone on Twitter – or direct information in a tweet their way. An example is

@onespartan, check out this link from @Sunglar

#followfriday (aka the space-saving #ff) is when twitter users recommend users that others should follow (and is done on Fridays, obviously) by including their username, preceeded by the @ sign and #ff in a tweet.

An example from how I do it:

★Ƒ๏ℓℓ๏ω★ ▬► @Stratos @Sunglar @JonBrazerEnt @RobertsonGames @richard_iorio #ff

Tweeps are people that follow each other on Twitter.

Twitter netiquette:

I want to know who you are. Show me an avatar that looks like you or at least is a good representation of you – and give me your name and where you’re from!

Be sociable. If you’re on Twitter and don’t participate, delete your account. It’s kind of creepy following someone without interacting with them, isn’t it?

Don’t spam! When you tweet unwanted information, ask people to retweet your tweets, offer “contests” to gain followers, or use the “Big Bad Things to do on Twitter” (see below) – you’re a spammer. You may not even consciously be doing it to be a spammer, but it is what you are all the same.

Twitter is not a chat room. Ever. The biggest villains are those behind #scifichat, at least from some of those I follow. If you want to chat, go to a chat room. We can’t easily filter out the tweets we get from people we follow – and getting slammed with tweets about little green Martians is not what I am interested in from Twitter (though they are interesting, of course).

Big Bad Things to do on Twitter:

Formspring
Formspring is set to autopost by default. So when someone eventually asks you what color your bowel movement was this morning and you answer – I’m the one getting shiat on. The autopost tweets usually do not have the full question or the full answer, but they do have the full URL that leads you back to Formspring. And that is spam.

FourSquare
I really don’t care where you are – unless you’re at GenCon or something cool. Relevant things are what’s happening, what you’re seeing, what you’re experiencing, who you’re with, how you feel, etc. These are the things that I am interested in. That’s why I’m on Twitter. FourSquare spams me with irrelevant information about you becoming the “mayor” of the men’s room at McDonald’s.

And getting as close to annoying as these above 2 is: Echo Bazaar – or any other browser game. I do not care about it, and I seriously doubt anyone else does, either. Sending out tweets from your game is spam.

Why I won’t follow you (and a lot of others won’t, either):

• No avatar.
• No name, location, or bio.
• Your website is a MySpace, Facebook or LiveJournal.
• You are following 1500 people but have nearly no followers.
• You have “expert” in your bio.
• You use Ebonics (see most of the daily trending topics such as #uknowughettowhen) or use l33t speak in your tweets.
• You’re a former child actor.

Hashtags gamers should use (and search for):

• #rpg
• #wargames
• #d20
• #dnd
• #pathfinder
• #mtg
• #miniatures
• #boardgames