Recently I posted some tips for people new to twitter. Although twitter is incredibly simple in concept there are some hints and tricks that might be useful for people who are ready to tear up their twitter L-plates.
Desktop & mobile applications - For many of us using twitter in the web browser is all we need but there are lots of other ways to access and post. The best way to find out more about these is to click on the linked name at the end of a post, where it says from Tweetdeck or Twhirl. There are many ways to tweet.
Favorites - If you want to save a tweet, so that you can refer to it later hover over it and click the star icon to the right. It will add it to your Favorites(sic) menu.
Other People’s Favorites - The Favorite menu on other people’s profiles is clickable so if someone interests you, you can see what interests them.
Twitter Search – Twitter has its own search engine. You can’t reach it directly from the twitter site but you can by clicking here.
Finding Retweets and multiple @posts – If you are still wondering what RT means it is a retweet and it is a key way for twitter users to propagate interesting content. But how do you know if someone has retweeted your post? Use Twitter Search and look for your own twitter identity. This will also show you @replies that have been sent to you where your name does not come at the start of the entry (these are automatically added to your @Replies list). This means that you won’t miss @replies that have been sent to you and other twitter users.
Monitoring - You can take an RSS feed for any Twitter Search. That means you can monitor terms in twitter with any RSS reader.
Posting long links - When you add a link twitter automatically crunches the link into a TinyUrl, but to do this the link plus message must be less than 140 characters. If the link is too long just open a Tinyurl page and crunch it yourself.
Linking to a tweet – you can post a url in twitter (or anywhere else) that links to a single twitter message – to find it click on the time that the twitter message was posted.
”Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system, and that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.” These were the sage like words of Clive Thompson in a piece called the ‘The See-Through CEO’ in Wired. March 2007. He identified a major new challenge for the PR industry; the need to consider and deliver against the results of relevant search.
Ever wondered why PR people are sometimes called flacks? No, me neither but come to think of it I’ve dodged some in my time as a PR person and too often from journalists. 
The BBC has dropped former Carol Thatcher daughter of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher from “The One Show” . The BBC took the action after she apparently used the word “golliwog” to describe a tennis player. The comments were allegedly made during a conversation with fellow presenters after filming for the programme had ended. Carol has appeared on the show as a regular roving reporter for the last three years.
Content that ranks highly in a Google search is de facto going to have more hits and more value. PR practitioners have to consider how digital PR supports good search rankings. 
