5 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Twitter

 Even though you are limited to 140 characters, Twitter provides a lot of power in short bursts.  Because of its vast reach and huge user base, Twitter provides a real time look at what is happening in the world and how people are reacting to it.  But if you are just logging in and glancing at your Twitter stream, you aren’t getting full use out of it.  That’s like downloading a bunch of WordPress Templates and then leaving the content blank; sure, you are using it somewhat, but you could be doing so much more with it.  Below are some ways to get the most value from your Twitter account and get insights into the world around you.

Weekly Email Digest

Sometimes it can be easy to miss important tweets as they can get buried in a sea of other tweets.  With Twitter’s weekly email digest, you can get a report of the top stories of the week from people you follow on Twitter.  This way, you will always know the most important stories of the day, and get insight into what people are talking about and how people feel about it.  It organizes topics, and you can click on avatars to see what that person tweeted about that topic.  It’s a great way to get the opinions of your friends and others about topics of the day.  And it will always give you something to talk about at the water cooler at work.

Top Tweets of the Week

This will send you an email weekly of the top tweets from Twitter.  These are often funny, interesting, or informative tweets that have been shared and re-shared thousands upon thousands of times.  This can also be a good way to get insight into human behavior, as it shows just what people find worthy of re-tweeting.  Both this email and the weekly digest emails can be turned on or off in your Settings section.  Receiving both can give you real insight into how to gain more followers.

Tailored Trends

Tailored Trends allows you to see what is popular on Twitter that also appeals to you.  While #JustinBieber may be extremely popular, if Twitter thinks you don’t care about this, it won’t show on your popular trend list.  Instead, it may show a sports team from your local area or show you a trend about a celebrity you follow or have tweeted about.  This way, you are always able to find content that is actually relevant to you instead of being stuck wading through a bunch of content you don’t care about.

Follower Suggestions

You can also have these emailed to you, so you can see different people that Twitter thinks you may find interesting.  This will allow you to find new people to follow which will, again, allow you to find new content you find interesting.  This way, Twitter will always remain fresh and relevant and keep you logging in.  This, too, is available in Settings to be turned either on or off.

Expanded Tweets

When you follow news outlets, it can be difficult to get the gist of the story in just 140 characters, so few outlets even try.  With expanded tweets, you can see the first few lines of the news story as well as the headline to determine if this is something you are interested in.  This saves you from having to click on a link and wait for a page to load (which can be long if browsing from a phone) and, instead, let you know before you click whether you are wasting your time or not.