Twitter Newbie Tip: Getting Past Stage Fright

If you’re new to Twitter or know someone who is, you’ll want to read this post.

We hear a lot about folks being hesitant to tweet because they’re afraid they’ll look foolish in some way, so instead they just silently observe – yet inside they long to join the fray. Know this: Twitter stage fright is the same as public speaking – you have to get out there and do it. It’s the only way to conquer it.

And we have some advice that will ease your mind.
Twitter is its own social animal. Nothing like Facebook – or even MySpace, for those who supposedly frequent that site, Twitter has a look, feel and interaction etiquette all its own.

The pace of the public feed streaming by can be disconcerting to new tweople – and once they figure out how the whole thing works, the confusion quickly turns to dread for many, with two questions looming large: What should I say? Will anyone notice/talk to me? It’s like the first day of school.

Here’s a tip: If you’re entirely stuck and don’t know what to say, a quick way to both find a topic and find folks to interact with is by jumping on a trending topic. Yes, they can be either lame or rowdy depending on the topic, but if you want to jump right in with something silly, there you go. Take today, for instance – who couldn’t think of SOMETHING to say about McDonalds’ McWings or Lies I Told My Parents?

OR – if you want a more professional route, you can always join in a Twitter chat. There are so many chats happening every day and covering a pretty endless list of topics. You can find out all about them, from how to join one to a master list of available chats here.

And if you start off on the wrong foot and can’t scroll back far enough to see what you did, you can always view your old tweets using one of these services and see how damaging they really were (you worry too much). Note that this will only work until you reach 3,200 tweets – after that point, there’s no going back!

Worst case? You can always delete your profile and those embarrassing tweets will go away . . . eventually. It’s best to learn to laugh at yourself and go with the flow though – or just avoid online participation entirely, as missteps are inevitable.

So tell those wallflowers to get out there and start tweeting!

Have you ever tweeted something you regretted? Tell us about it, if you’re brave!

(Man peeking out photo from Shutterstock)

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Twitter Tip: Don’t Auto-Connect Your Facebook And Twitter Accounts

Twitter has made it deceptively easy to connect your Twitter account to your Facebook account, but don’t be fooled. It’s usually not a good idea.

Twitter and Facebook are two distinct networks with two distinct sets of etiquette and norms. Posting all of your tweets to your Facebook wall may sound like a good idea at first (I can keep my friends updated oneverything going on in my life!), but believe me, neither your Facebook nor your Twitter friends will thank you.

How to do it

Before we get into the details of why it’s a bad idea to connect your Twitter to your Facebook account, here’s how to do it (for those who want to flout my advice):

As Twitter’s Help Center explains, you can post all of your tweets to your Facebook profile using an official application. You simply have to be logged in to your Twitter account and your Facebook account, and navigate to the app page: http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/. Then, just click “Allow” when asked if you want to connect your two accounts, and voila! you’re all hooked up.

After setting this up, all of your tweets will be simultaneously posted to your Facebook profile, with a little note at the bottom mentioning that it came from Twitter.

Why you shouldn’t

Now that you know how, here’s why you shouldn’t auto-tweet to your Facebook profile.

Twitter and Facebook are two very different networks. The people you’re connected to on Twitter expect different things than those you’re connected to on Facebook (even if most of them are the same group of people).

Twitter is a high-volume network, where you can tweet ten or twenty times a day and no one will say boo. Because you are encouraged to follow lots of different people – those you know and those you don’t – and because you don’t require their permission to do so, Twitter is a more informal and loosely connected network.

Facebook, on the other hand, is much more personal. You friend people who have to accept your friend request, implying some level of familiarity. The volume of updates on Facebook is much, much less than on Twitter! People expect one, maybe two status updates a day, maximum.

The culture of both networks is different, so if you combine them you risk alienating your audience. By posting your tweets to your Facebook profile, you’ll inundate your Facebook friends with status update after status update, taking over their newsfeed and appearing spammy. Those 10 tweets will fit perfectly within Twitter’s real-time home timeline, but they’ll clutter up your Facebook wall and may even result in a block or an unfriending.

The syntax of both networks is also different. Twitter relies on “#”s and “@”s to function and uses abbreviations like “RT”, while Facebook’s syntax is less niche. If your fill up your Facebook wall with status updates from Twitter like “@JustinBieber you #RockMyWorld RT @YourFriend Isn’t @JustinBieber so amazing?”, your Facebook friends will quickly become annoyed.

The exceptions

Of course, there are some exceptions to every rule.

If you don’t tweet very often (say, once or twice per day at the most, and not even every day at that), connecting Twitter to Facebook might not make much difference to your Facebook followers.

Still, the better way, in my opinion, to post a tweet to your Facebook wall is just by syncing both your Twitter account and your Facebook account to a dashboard like HootSuite, and selecting both networks for those tweets you feel also belong on Facebook. This way you can choose which Twitter messages to also post to Facebook, rather than being at the whim of an auto-updater.

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HOWTO: Send Tweets To Facebook

Twitter has made it easier to send tweets to Facebook. All you have to do is click one single button. Here’s how:

First, log in to your Twitter account.

Next, click the “Profile” tab at the top of the screen, and then click “Edit Profile” just below your profile picture. Scroll down to the bottom of this page, and click the button that says “Post your Tweets to Facebook”. And that’s it!

(Note that you must also be signed in to Facebook for this to work. If you’re not, you’ll be asked to sign in and give your permission to the app before it will work)

In a smart move, Twitter will not send tweets that begin with an @mention to your Facebook wall, as these are usually meant for another, specific Twitter user and would likely be seen as spam by your Facebook friends.

Prior to this update, if you wanted to send a tweet to Facebook, you had to first find and authorize a Facebook app to access your Twitter account, and even then the functionality was spotty at best. This new functionality makes sending tweets to Facebook more of a native Twitter experience.

As a word of warning: Twitter and Facebook are two different networks with two different types of syntax and etiquette. It isn’t always advisable to connect one network to another, for fear of alienating your connections on both. You can read more about why connecting your Twitter and Facebook accounts might not be a good idea in our article here.

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Add Twitter Updates On Blogger Using jQuery

Twitter plugin on blogger, yet another must have plugin for bloggers. Unlike the normal plugin offered by Twitter, this uses jQuery script with easy to integrate and also easy to modify for any blogspot blogs. It is not just a twitter update plugin, you can also highlight reply and links, to make your Twitter updates more resourceful. Thanks to Philip for making tweetable script. So here are the steps to add Twitter updates on Blogger blogs.

Step 1: Before getting into the script section. We need to call jQuery within our blogger template. So inorder to do that, just paste the below code after <head>

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://sites.google.com/site/bloggermintcom/jquery.tweetable.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Step 2: Now navigate to Blogger dashboard > Layout > Page Elements. Click on Add a Gadget and select HTML / Javascript and enter the code which you find below

<div id="tweets">
<script type='text/javascript'>

$(function(){

$('#tweets').tweetable({username: 'bloggermint', time: true, limit: 5});
});
</script>
</div>

Now change the user name with your twitter user name and you can also change the number of updates to display, by just changing the limit value.Click here to see the live demo

Drop in your comments, if you need help in blogger integration.

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How to subscribe to Twitter tweets RSS feeds

Do you know that you can even subscribe to RSS feeds of your favorite Twitter user. Yes, you can subscribe to it and get notified in your RSS reader, whenever their is a new tweet. Here is a small tutorial how you can do that.

1. Visit the Twitter home page of the user whom tweets you want to subscribe to.

2. Click the link RSS Feeds of [username] tweets and that’s it, I hope that you know the rest.

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