Street-smart Tweeter

Here’s how you can avoid looking like someone who picked up tweeting just yesterday.

Last week we looked at two of the five basic principles of good tweeting. Here are the rest. Also, we’ll keep it short and try to be complete. For that, in essence, is the way to tweet.

Communicate Efficiently: For starters, acquaint yourself with a well-crafted, mostly entertaining and quite generous sample of the best tweets according to one respected authority here. Or study, stalk and follow my personal favourite MrsStephenFry (alter-ego of the very witty Stephen Fry). Simply speaking, look and learn from the experts to say more economically.

Don’t forget to emoticon: The remoteness of terminal-to-terminal engagement means it’s rather easy to slip from serious to casual to pushy to indifferent to rude in a trice. Web users, especially in a character-constrained conversation area like Twitter might want to keep an eye out for this lapse, and master the use of emoticons. For emoticons accomplish, to some extent, in the virtual world what touch, feel and gesture do for real-life conversations. ‘Warmify’ them, even if only superficially. That’s more than enough for most people. Elementary case in point: ‘You’re terrible :-)’ is way more acceptable than ‘You’re terrible.’ Case closed.

Learn Tweet-speak: Know what you’re tweeting or, at least, come across as someone who does. Here
are six words worth dropping in your tweets, until you learn more.

beetweet: a buzzing tweet; a ‘hot’ tweet. Usage: Allo, Allo, any betweets from Tharoor that I missed? Please be tweeting me in!

sweeple: sweet Twitter people. Usage: Hello Sweeple! Yes, I got off the right side of the bed this Monday. Thanks Paa.

tweetheart: that special tweeter who makes your heart skip a beat. Usage: Pyar is impossible with my tweetheart. I think I’ll ask her out for Pyar Impossible. Heh.

twiking: biking while twittering via text. Usage: Twiking away. Having fun and knocking off the pounds. Little black dress, here I come!

twittectomy: an un-following of friends. Usage: If only if were as easy to twittectomise my celebrity life. No tweeple, it’s not all fun being famous. Agree?

twitterrhea: the act of sending too many Twitter messages. Usage: No more twitterrhea from me. Shut up, Sid! It’s easy once you know how.

Bon Voyage.

About The Author

Avinash Subramaniam