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.
PR and the Social Web 
Just a comment about shortened URLs: compared to several of the other services, the tinyurl ones are very long. I use http://is.gd/ (the URLS it produces are that bit plus four characters), but there’s also http://tr.im/ and a few others. I’m fairly sure that tr.im is the one which lets you create an account from which you can then keep track of how many times your shortened URL has been accessed.
My two fundamental pieces of advice on using Twitter would be “Don’t access it via the official website”, “Ignore Twitter’s own terminology and description of itself”, and “On no account take any notice at all of the question What are you doing?.