Jimmy Z

I started using Twitter on the 25th of November, 2008. Before then, I thought Twitter was an immense waste of time. I finally saw the light, joined, and have become a huge fan.

Here are a few things I did to help me get hooked on Twitter.

1. Used the Gmail address book finder from the “Find People” link at the top. This helped me connect quickly with about 15 friends I didn’t even know used Twitter.

2. Found more friends to follow by exploring my friends’ “Following” lists.

3. Installed TweetDeck and Twitterberry. TweetDeck makes posting updates to your timeline really easy. It also has a handy URL shortener and gives you fast Desktop notification of your friends’ updates. Twitterberry allows you to easily give updates while you are on the go without needing to use SMS.

4. Began tracking my links with Tr.im. Tr.im is a link shortening service that will give you click stats on all of the links you post. These numbers will begin to show you the power of Twitter as a broadcast medium. Think nobody is listening because they don’t reply? Tr.im will show you that people actually do care about what you post.

5. Began posting regularly, although I still go through dry spells at time.

Hopefully this post will help other Twitter newbies more effectively use Twitter.

What have you done to get hooked on Twitter?

Any WordPress plug-ins I should be aware of? Other tools?

If you find yourself falling behind in getting all of your emails read, like I have in the past week, you may find it useful to put the following in your Gmail search:

is:unread in:inbox

This will filter your messages to just those that are unread and in your inbox. Pretty cool. This help a lot for me because I have a lot of filters on my mail that mark some mailing list emails as ‘read’ and put others under different labels without marking them as read.