Top 10 Tips for Twitter Beginners

PCMag has a nice overview of the 10 things you should know when you’re starting out with the now very hot, microblogging service Twitter.

A couple of additional comments.

1. Shrink Your URLS. – Sharing links is one of the most popular uses for Twitter. The articles using a number of external services for shrinking long URLs. Personally, I use bit.ly, but if you use a service like TweetLater or HootSuite (both of which will simplify your ‘tweeting’), they will automatically shrink URLs. Bit.ly is brilliant and infinitely useful, BTW.

6. Categorize Your Tweets for Added Visibility. If you’re on Twitter for any length of time, you’ll notice that people often use a hashmark (#) in front of a word. This makes it easy for others to find your tweet and perhaps follow you. Hashtags.org allows you to follow topics that have been categorized real-time.

7. Pick a Good Desktop Client. The article suggests trying TweetDeck, Twhirl or Twitterfox, claming these make receiving tweets and following lots of people is easier.  I use both TweetDeck and Twhirl and have come to the conclusion that there are pros and cons to both and both are missing features that are found in the alphabet soup of Twitter apps that I’ve previously written about.