Consistently over the past 10 months when I am speaking at conferences, one of the areas I get the most questions about is Twitter. This post is the first in several where I’ll do my best to share with you my experience with Twitter and answer many of your questions, and share with you some terrific resources from around the Web on this rapidly growing tool.

How do I get started? Create your account at www.twitter.com. Then, you start looking for people to “follow” which means you’ll see their updates or “tweets”. Etiquette dictates many that you follow will start following you, too, although not all will. You’ll see some good ideas in my list of people I follow if you’d like to look at that, I can be found at www.twitter.com/shannonkin.

WHY get started? For many, Twitter is a fantastic tool to drive traffic to your blog or Web site by posting links and headlines. For me, Twitter is like an RSS reader on steroids combined with the best of social networking – I follow people that are influencers in my industry and social media in general, and receive recommendations from them in a constant stream of what I should be reading, watching, and thinking about. You should consider Twitter a powerful resource, if you are following the right people. So, how do you find them? Here are a few ways:
• Search on Twitter – http://twitter.com/invitations. This allows you to search your address books, searches by name, and suggested followers (this works much better once you build a group of posts and followers, and should be checked regularly)
• The Twitter Pack Wiki – started by avid Tweeters, this wiki is full of resources by topic or industry of people that you should consider following. http://twitterpacks.pbwiki.com/
• Two sites that have algorithms to try to show authority / value based on key words you search: Twitority is a new service that that facilitates the search and sorting of keywords in Twitter by authority, or in less controversial terms, popularity. At the moment, authority is measured by followers, but perhaps, Twitority will eventually create an algorithm similar to Twinfluence in order to more accurately measure influence

Now that I’m here, how do I use Twitter?
Three quick tips for using Twitter:
1. Replies / message someone publicly:  when you want to direct a message to someone else, you’ll see people use the @ symbol. So, if you write a message that says @shannonkin how are you?, it’ll show to everyone, but will go directly to me as a REPLY. Sometimes I’ll ask questions of the crowd like Survey: what are your best tips for your car dealers online? And when people write me back they will write @shannonkin – try this. I check my replies and see who has written me specifically.
2. Messaging someone privately: you can use the link that says “message”, and they are called direct messages or DMs. The way to do it is to go to my page, and click the link “message shannonkin” or go to your link on the right that says DIRECT MESSAGES.
3. What are these # symbols about? It’s twitter etiquette when you “tweet” from a conference or group setting to use this symbol. This is also used in some cases for topics, like #cooking. Everyone from the group essentially agrees on the symbol and then you put it in the tweet, so people can track it – it’s like real-time blogging. So, you can search on the symbol #WCAA and see all of us that are tweeting about the WCAA conference, even if it’s not someone you were following already. Sometimes I use this to find new people I want to follow

I get the concept, but the site is hard to use. Are there other tools?
Fortunately, there are a variety of cool tools that make managing Twitter easy whether you are using your computer or your phone. My two favorites are Tweetdeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/) and Twhirl (http://www.twhirl.org/).  As I write this Tweetdeck is beeping away as my peers are tweeting about a wide variety of topics. Happy Tweeting!