Twitter Commands

Twitter is an exceptional way of marketing to your target audience while creating awareness of your website or product through passive social marketing tactics.

One of the fundamental mistakes that new marketers, venturing into the world of Twitter often make, is the belief that the “more the merry”, and when it comes to sending out broadcasts (otherwise known as “tweets”) that is definitely not always the case. In fact, I know of many marketers and consumers will who remove someone who is sending out too many tweets. While it’s important to be consistent and active, it’s equally as important to balance out the number of tweets you send with the type of information being published.

For example, if you are interested in developing a reputation on Twitter as someone worth following, and you want to retain the interest of those on your list, you will want to do your best to provide entertaining, useful and informative tweets, rather than always sending out promotional ones.

People within social communities lose interest quickly, especially if they believe that those people on their own lists are only interested in marketing to them.  Keep in mind that many people join social communities for the joy of meeting similarly minded individuals to both network with and learn from, and if you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to take care of how frequent your messages are, as well as how often you are offering something of value.

Here are a few twitter commands that will help you begin utilizing the power of the Twitter community:

fav username

This will make the users last update as a favorite, and also save them for you under the “Favorites” link in your stats area on your main page.

If you wish to remove a stored favorite, just click on the “Favorites” link and you will see the tweet, along with the username of the person and a yellow star under their post.

@your-friend Hi, how are you doing? Long time, no talk!

The @ symbol is placed directly in front of the username of the person you are attempting to message.

d your-friends-username how are you doing?

The letter ‘d’ represents ‘Direct” and the message will be sent directly to the username I specify in my message.

Follow your-friends-username

Typing this into your Instant Messenger system will ensure that you receive updates and alerts from ‘your-friends-username’ (replace this with an actual username of someone on your list).

If you wish to disable receiving updates from a specific user you use the off ‘leave’ command like this:

leave your-friends-username

If you wanted to retrieve the profile information for a specific user on Twitter you use the WHOIS command:

whois your-friends-username

Information pertaining to this specific user will be displayed provided they have included a Twitter profile.

get your-friends-username

This command will load an info box with their current status message.

You nudge someone by typing in: nudge username