subject: Twitter Translated: 5 Unique Twitter Terms Explained [print this page] With Twitter and LinkedIn launching their synchronisation love-in last week, there is a growing sense of inevitability about the deepening integration taking place between social networking platforms. As Scott Monty surmised in his social marketing blog, this is already leading to interesting developments when very different audiences collide, particularly when the language used is distinct and often unintelligible to the other user community. This is especially true of Twitter, where technical restrictions of the platform combined with the 140 character limit of the service has led to the creation of a language with its own terminology, grammar and social mores. Its not difficult to imagine the irritation non twitterers might feel when status updates start to resemble schoolyard SMS with a few random abbreviations thrown in.
So before we have a fall out, have a quick look at this: A Survival Phrasebook on the 5 most commonly used Twitter terms.
1. Tw___.
Yes, thats right tweeps, Twitter pioneers have shown their true geek colours by rebranding old words by the simple device of adding the prefix Tw or Twitter to any English word that will take it. Examples include:
twitterverse the sum total of everyone on twitter
twitterati - active users of twitter
tweeple people
twestival a twitter organised festival
tweetflash a breaking news item on twitter
You get the picture. Thankfully, the semantics havent changed, only the spelling.
2. RT.
An abbreviation of another twitter coined term, the Retweet. Many people think the real point of Twitter is the ease and speed with which information can become viral. If your update is sufficiently interesting or important, your followers may be inclined to forward it to their followers who in turn may do the same. Within moments your post could be reaching an audience of thousands. RT has become the Twitteratis method of indicating forwarded content the letters themselves dont have a technical function (you can forward any tweet without them just as well) so its really a method of attribution, giving credit for the original tweeters tweet, so to speak. It has also come to be used as an appeal to spread the message significantly used during emergency or disaster situations, such as the Mumbai bombings of 2008 and the Iranian Presidential elections in 2009.
3. # or hashtag.
A user driven agreement to collect tweets on a particular topic to make it easier for people to search for and contribute to a conversation. Agreement is reached simply through hitting a tipping point in usage users insert the # in front of the topic title and tweet away. If enough people agree to use the hashtag, the topic can trend more about this later. In this way news can spread, almost always faster than traditional distribution channels. Social action (or reaction) can be seen in the #trafigura and #janmoir, where controversial legal and editorial decisions by the oil trading company Trafigura and The Daily Mail led to a widespread outpouring of anger, creating trending topics which at one moment had both Trafigura and Jan Moir as the most tweeted about topics worldwide. The negative publicity generated was such that the Trafigura ruling was overturned, whilst the Daily Mail lost most of its online sponsors, with Jan Moir having to post an apology 24 hours later.
4. Trending topics.
A subject of conversation that is popular enough to ranked by Twitter. The subject itself could be anything a football result, a political summit or the return of Elvis its the users who decide by tweeting about it. This is the reason why Twitter founder Biz Stone thinks the platform has potential to become a Virtual Water Cooler by tracking trending topics on twitter or 3rd party application like Twitscoop or Trendmaps anyone with an account can swiftly see what people are generally talking about at any point in time, anywhere in the world and contribute to it. It is also a great way to get scoop trending has proven to be a much faster way of a receiving news now classic examples include NBA star Shaquille ONeals trade to the Cleveland Cavaliers (Shaq himself found out through a twitter user telling him the deal had been done) and the Continental Airlines 737 crash in Denver when the plane slid off the runway during take-off on Dec 21. Passenger Mike Wilson famously tweeted. Holy f**king s**t I was just in a plane crash!
5. @.
When used in tweets, or in a search, it will look for a user profile rather than the content of that users tweets. For instance, a search on @iran will bring up results of individuals who have the word iran in their username, rather than any tweets about the Islamic Republic of Iran. In many respect @ is the opposite to # in the twitterspeak @ for users, # for content. It is used as a method of attribution and of messaging the users whove been mentioned this way can check what is being said about them and who is saying it. For companies and individuals alike, its a great way to monitor brand reputation and even to address customer service issues before they build momentum. Facebook liked it enough to lift the entire concept lock, stock & barrel with its new tagging feature.
Theres plenty more. For those who wish to do more research on how Twitter works, you can do worse than check out the leading social media guide online, Mashable.com. Alternatively, you can always just sign up and get using it. www.twitter.com
