Make Sense of Twitter Lingo!
With all the social media platforms growing over the past decade, there are a lot of terms to know and understand. You hear other people dropping odd terms like hashtag, tweet, follow, mention.. but what do they all REALLY mean. I pulled together the most used terms for Twitter, to help make some sense of it all.
Tweet: It can be used as a noun or a verb, but essentially is referring to the post or message.
Hashtag: A hashtag means this ‘#’ symbol marking a keyword or topic. This keyword is then searchable and you can view conversations that contained that hashtag/topic.
Handle: Your Twitter ‘handle’ is actually your Twitter name or address, kind of like your unique url. It’s your username, so that people can find you, and also mention you in their posts. It is preceded by the @ symbol and is linkable. For example (@JohnDoe)
Mention: When you ‘mention’ someone in Twitter, it means you have used their username (@johnDoe) in their posts.
Follow: If you follow someone’s tweets, it means you subscribe to their ‘newsfeed’. You will then see their tweets and posts.
Follower / ing: You will see on your Twitter page the number of followers you have. ‘Following’ would be the number of people that subscribe to your posts. A follower is one that is following your posts.
Retweet: You are sharing, posting or forwarding someone else’s ‘tweet’ to your followers.
Geotagging: It means you can show where you are located in real time (at a specific restaurant for example). It is also referred to as Geolocation.
Favorite: You can also label a tweet as ‘favorite’, by clicking a yellow star next to the post (or tweet).
So now that you are up on the lingo, delve into Twitter and take advantage of the benefits of connecting with potential clients, industry leaders, co-workers, peers and more to help grow your business.
