1. Sign up for a twitter account. Its free.
-Use your real name, the name of your company, or something else real or that relates to your industry. If you wish to remain anonymous, then so be it. But its more fun to be a real human online. Just saying.2. Follow us. Go to twitter.com/thedailycity and click the "follow" button. Why follow us first? We use twitter well (if we don't say so ourselves!) and you can learn what good tweets (what twitter users call updates) look like. They're as short as possible, use abbreviations, give credit to sources of information and have useful links.
-For your icon, if you're a person, use a photo of your face. If you're a business, use your logo. If you have a photo you use on other social networking sites, use it here, too. Keep it all consistent.
-In your description, put the url of your blog, site, or something that users can click on to learn more about you and your business. If you're just a person with no url, then just list titles you'd be called (mother, good neighbor, Orlando native, etc)
3. Follow other sources of information, not your friends. This one tip will make you love twitter, while all your friends whine about how twitter is "just Facebook updates." Twitter is a place to gather knowledge. Save your personal chit chat for Facebook and texting. We follow the twitter accounts of museums, newspapers, culture blogs, the works. We follow people only if they provide good links or consistently have posts of interest to our blog.
4. What's your industry? Search on twitter for key words or publication titles and follow those that look reputable, real and regular (they send out updates regularly).
5. RT: See a tweet you want to re-tweet? Then RT (re-tweet) it! RT auto-adds the name of the twitter user who created the tweet you're RT-ing, thus giving them credit. It also prevent you from having to re-type the tweet.
6. The "@" sign: Before any twitter user name, you must place an "@" sign. This lets people click on that name to visit that person's page (and possibly start following them, too) and alerts that user you just sent a tweet out about them or to them.
7. Download and use Seesmic Desktop. With it, you can enjoy (for free) multiple twitter accounts and your Facebook account all in one spot on your desktop, as an application. Why have multiple twitter accounts? if you have a business, you should have a business twitter account and a personal one, and Seesmic Desktop keeps this task simple.
8. Use twitter on the go, but sparingly. No one cares what you eat, drink, buy or do, unless it is worth knowing about. Try to provide value. See a celeb, a big event, something people should know about? Tweet it. Bought a late'? Don't tweet it.
9. Make that tweet sparkle: To send tweets with photos, use twitpic.com. To send tweets with video, use one of the five choices listed here. To send tweets with audio (iPhone only) try Tweetmic. Its perfectly fine to send a tweet with a photo and a brief description of what it is. The more interesting the topic of the photo, the more brief the description, the better.
10. Tag your posts. I find this unimportant, but I do it if it pertains to a large event or company or entity. For example, we tried to tag all our Orlando Fringe posts with #orlandofringe. Many folks did as well. Now you can go back and see who did, and what they said, when you do a search for that tag. See who tagged their posts with #orlandofringe.
There's more to twitter than these ten tips of course, but this is enough for now to digest. You'll find out the rest on your own. Send us any questions and feedback you have.