Transcription
How to Use Twitter - Complete Beginner's Guide
Hey everyone. In today's how-to video, I want to show you how to use Twitter. So if you're new to the Twitter platform, or if you haven't used it for a while, this is the right video for you. It's going to be a complete beginner's guide to Twitter. Twitter is one of the original social media platforms it's been around since 2006, and it was a text-based platform.
So you could only share your thoughts in text, but now they've added a lot more like sharing videos and images too and Twitter has over 300 million users at the time that I'm recording this and it's a publicly-traded company in the U.S. meaning you could buy Twitter stocks. Let's jump on the computer.
I want to show you how to sign up for Twitter at twitter.com. They do have mobile apps for iOS and Android, and I'll make a completely separate video and I'll put a link to it in the description, but this is going to cover all the fundamentals of using Twitter. You could go to twitter.com here to go ahead and sign up for an account and if you've previously made one, simply log into that account. Well, what's nice about Twitter is you could actually search the website here or look at all these different tabs and explore Twitter here of what it has to offer before even creating an account. So we'll go ahead and create an account, but I wanted to show you that this was available.
So the search option here on top of all these tabs where you could explore different topics here is available on the homepage. Let's go ahead and press sign up and it's a very simple sign-up process to name you to want a phone number or email instead, and your birthday here, because you have to be at least 13 years old to use Twitter.
So I'll go through the signup process and I just come to the signup page. So this is going to be my username right on top and I'll press sign up and if you use the email or phone number, you most likely have to verify with a verification code and I'll have to create a password. So I'll just go ahead and create that right now and if you want to put a profile picture here, you could just upload it on this page. So I'll go ahead and add mine here. I'll just use the logo here. This is going to be a business profile and I'll press apply and I could press next. You can fill out your bio here or skip for now, and you could add some of your interests here.
So it kind of customizes the homepage for you. So you could just choose from a variety of different topics here. It doesn't have to be just a few choices as many as you like, and then you could press next. Then it's going to recommend some people to follow here. So choose as many as you like here and press follows on top and this is what the homepage looks like. Again, if you followed people, they're going to show up here. If you don't follow anyone, this area might be empty for you. So it definitely would work best if you follow at least a handful of people. So as you scroll through this, you'll see their tweets it's right in the center of the page, and this on top here, right on the homepage, what's happening.
This is where you would compose your tweet. So whatever you want to say goes here. And you have some other options here. So let's go ahead and do our first tweet. So it's called a tweet here. When you use Twitter here to kind of write out your thoughts and this used to be limited to 140 characters. So each letter here counts as a character, including spaces, but back in 2017, they extended it to 280 characters and as you type more, you could see fill out, you see this line here, fill out. So that's how many characters you could have until it fills out a very useful option there. So if I just press tweet, now, it's going to create this tweet, but let me show you some other options here over here. You could basically add attachments here.
So if I choose this image, the attachment is going to get access to my photo library and I could go ahead and add an attachment here. If I wanted to do that. I could go ahead and click that attachment and actually change the size of a change. The cropping of it. If I wanted to. So at the bottom of the page, you basically could zoom things in and out.
You could change the aspect of them. So you could be a little bit different. You can move them around and then you could go ahead and save them if it looks okay. If you want to add that attachment to your tweets. So I could go ahead and save that and that's going to go along with my first tweet. If I change my mind, I could always click X.
I don't have to add an image, the same thing with gifts here. So you could go ahead and select or search from all these different ones. If you want to add these to your tweet. Again, your text will go along with it. So that's an option you have here. You have your polls. This is basically a multiple-choice question, and you could run a length of time of how long you want this to be up.
So your question would go here. The choices would go here and the length of time would be here. I'll go ahead and remove it for now and then you'll have the emoji options. So as long as your cursor is here and you select emojis, you could go ahead and add emojis to the end wherever your cursor ends up.
So if I wanted to add a smiley face, that will add a, just like that, and I could go on and search or select one of these other categories here to add more, for example, and another useful option inside of the composing, a tweet option is this plus sign. If you press this could I actually add another tweet to your first tweet?
So this way you could kind of tell a longer story and you still have these four options here to add any of these options here to the other tweet, but it's basically going to tweet multiple different tweets at the same time because you do have that character limit on each one. But people use this all the time to tell a longer story that requires more than 280 characters, all press X out of this one, and I'll press discard and I got rid of my full tweet. So if you do press that plus sign. In the original tweet you composed, if you change, your mind will disappear too. So I'll retape it and you could go ahead and press tweet right here and he will basically post it on the wall. So who's going to see this tweet. Well, right now, no, one's going to see it because no one is following me, but as people start to follow you they'll basically see tweets like Elon Musk's tweet is showing up here on my wall because I follow them.
So as you make more tweets, people are going to see them on their feet here and under each tweet, after you post one or from other people too, like they'll have the same options on their neath each one. So I want to show you some of these options here. This first one here basically is a reply to your own tweet or reply to someone else's.
So if you click it on your own tweet, it's going to add another tweet as a reply and if you press it on other people's, it's going to basically create a reply to their tweet. The next one here, this one is very useful. This is called a retweet. If you click it retweet is basically you sharing a tweet on your page.
So this is my Twitter account and if I press retweet on any tweet, I could go ahead and retweet that. Now, you could do this on your own, or you could do it to other people. So whichever one makes the most sense. So if I wanted to do this Elon Musk one, for example, I could go ahead and press it and retweet it and it will show up on my page. So if I go to my page by clicking my app of the day icon here, if I click that you could see on my homepage, that I had the two tweets that I created and the one I retweeted here, we'll explore this page a little bit more in a second. Let me just go back to the same page we were on before you could also heart tweets.
So this is like a way to say this is one of my favorite tweets, so that gives it a heart. You could press the upload icon here and send it as a direct message. Now, Twitter has a whole messaging system, direct messages where you could direct message individual people, meaning having one-on-one conversations besides these public tweets.
So that's another thing we'll explore in a second. You could also copy the link to the tweet too. So you could explore these two options a little bit more, and you have these three lines that show you kind of the analytics of your engagement and how many people saw this. So the impressions show that, and the total engagement is how many people interacted with it.
Like gave it a heart or retweeted it and finally, you have this little down arrow here. If you click it, you could go ahead and delete one of these. If you don't like one of the tweets you created, you could delete it. If you could pin it to your profile and I'll explore that on the profile page. So I'll go ahead and pin this one and I'll press pin.
So I could show you in the profile window, I could embed it. This basically gives you an embed code. So if you want to put this on a website, for example, to make it look like this, you could do that using that option and you could click the view activity, which basically shows you the same analytics that I showed you with this icon.
So that does the same thing. You could have links to videos. If you want to share videos, that's a way you would do that. So let me pull a video here to show you what that looks like. So for example, if I wanted to share one of the videos, I would say, have you seen this, and I would copy and paste the link.
So I'm just pasting a link here from a YouTube video and I could go ahead and tweak that and people will get a link here that they could click to go to that YouTube video. Besides using this top window here to tweet, you could also click this option on the left side and it will open up this window here, kind of works the same way.
You still have the four options. You still could put links to videos, but I just wanted to show you that this was not the only place to create your tweet. You could just simply press this on the left side. So let's jump into our profile and explore that. So on any tweet that you've created, you could click your profile name here to go there or the options on the left side, we will explore some of these other ones too, but I'll click a profile to go to my profile and all your profile is going to have your username right on top here, this ad mentioned sign, that's your Twitter handle? So if someone asks for your Twitter handle, this is it and he has to be unique.
That's why he added a number for me because some other ones were taken. You could also edit your profile here. So changing your banner and changing your profile. So if I click that, it brings me back to this page where I could change my name here, your bio, your location, your website, and you could alter your birthday here, all on this edit profile page.
You could also add a banner here so you could create a banner and just go ahead and upload it here and press apply and this is now how my profile is going to look now you're following. This is who you're following, and this is who's following you right now. No, one's following me because I just created this account to show you.
But as you follow more people, they'll show up here and as people follow you, they'll show up over here. Now, anytime on any one of these tweets, you still have this down arrow here to delete or unpinned a tweet like the options I showed you before, but when you pin a tweet, you basically show up. On your profile right on top.
So that's why this one showed up right on top because I pressed this and pinned it to the top. Now, some of these other tabs, if you go to Twitter and replies, usually going to see some other options. So some of your tweets and replies are going to show up here, especially if you go ahead and reply to someone in a tweet, which I'll show you in a second media is if you post a media like video, this is basically what they ended up showing like on a feed.
Anytime you give a tweet. One of these hearts here is going to show up under the like tab. So that's basically the four windows you have on your profile. Now, if you wanted to reply to a tweet, that's the first option, the way we reply to our own, but you could do it to someone else. So you could press that and you could go ahead and tweet your reply and it's going to say replying to them at the mentioned sign so that person's username here and then they're going to basically get a notification that you tweeted at them, or you send them a reply. Let's explore the left side a little bit more. So the home option we went through, is where you create your own tweets and you could see everybody else that you're following here, but you also have this explore page.
Let's go there. Under the explore page. This is pretty much like the homepage I showed you before you logged in. So you could search Twitter. You could just browse through all these different categories. This page is pretty straightforward. Notification is pretty straightforward. If they use the add sign and use your username to mention you it'll show up over here.
We'll do that in a second too and all your notification like retweets and a whole lot more, they show up right here messages sometimes require you to verify your account with a phone number. So I didn't do that in this case. So he asked me to do it. If he asks you the same thing, you have to go through the verification process to continue.
So I'll go back to messages here and this is what the direct message platform of Twitter looks like and this page is pretty straightforward. You could start a conversation search for someone here. Some people can be messaged if they've had some settings changed, but this is typically how you could create a new message and go next to continue to send them a message.
I'll just randomly type someone's name as John, for example, as you can see, a lot of people have this option turn off a lot of people don't so you could mess it. Some people, if it allows you to message them and you could go ahead and press next and just like that, he opens this conversation here where you could go ahead and, and start a new message, send them a message, send them a gift, send them an image. Send them an emoji. It works all the same way as a regular tweet, but privately between two people, then you have the bookmark option. So on any of your pages, for example, on the homepage, let me jump back right here to the homepage. You could go ahead and press this upload icon right here and there was an option here to bookmark a tweet that we didn't cover. So if you select that now, if you go to the bookmark page that will show up over here. So if you want it to look at tweets at another time, that's how you would do it there. Then you have your lists, which by default your pin tweets is going to be a list up here, but you could create your own list here.
So I'll name these how-to videos and I can make this private and I could go ahead and press next. I could add members to this list if I want to, and I could press done and it'll show up over here now, basically, as you have more members on this list and they tweet they'll show up all over years. So that's one way to use the lists option here, you have your profile again, that we went over and you have the more option that gives you some more advanced things that I've made separate videos about but running Twitter ads.
For example, if you're using this for businesses available here, more about your analytics, your settings, and some display options that come in handy, like font size and color, dark mode is available on that more option and typically on the right side, you're going to keep seeing this. You might like this.
So it's going to recommend that you follow different pages. So anytime you want to follow someone, you either could see it here from show me more. You could go ahead and press follow. Now they'll show up on your home feed or you could search for people. So let's say I wanted to follow the Twitter account here.
I could select that press search and right there, people, Twitter, this is the official Twitter, Twitter, so I could press follow here and I could follow them just like that. I'll go back to the homepage now and now I should see other posts. So YouTube, I just followed should show up here and as I follow more and more different accounts here. They'll show up over here on the homepage and anytime I do want to show you this option on other people's tweets, you could go ahead and press this down arrow and you'll get some different options here. So some of them are what you saw before, or like embedding a tweet on a website, for example. But you could press not interested in this. If you don't want to see it, you could unfollow people this way. You could go ahead and mute people. You can block people, you could add them, remove them to lists. So the list I created, that's where you would click this and you will add them to a list just like this and press save.
So now, if I jump back to this, how to list here, I should have more tweets underneath it from the person I added that member I added, which is YouTube. So that's another way to use lists and let me show you two very popular things. When you're composing a tweet. The first one is the mentioned sign, a Mac is a shift.
Number two, creates the add sign and if I type another Twitter account and another Twitter handle like mine, you basically search it and I could select it and I could type my message and he will basically tag that person. So they'll get a notification if they have that turned on and it'll show up on their mentioned tab and you have hashtags, which became popular on the Twitter way before Instagram and TikTok where you can basically type in any hashtags. I could type in any word right here. I just saw this word science. So I typed it and you could see how many tweets you had in the last hour and get some related hashtags.
So this is one of the ways to get discovered. So if you're using your Twitter as a way to grow a social media platform, hashtags are one of those ways. So you could use some of your 280 characters here. To use different hashtags as you type in your thoughts and use those hashtags either as part of your message or towards the end of it and then you could go ahead and tweet that and when people click that, he basically takes them to all the top hashtags related to that hashtag could also be searched under the search icon. So you could go ahead and type out a hashtag, and then you could go ahead and just press enter here and it'll take you back to that same page that I showed you by clicking a hashtag.
So a couple of different ways to get there. Thanks so much for watching. Make sure you subscribe for easy-to-follow tech and social media videos posted every single day and I'll see you next time.