Twitter Lingo You Must Know

Before getting to deep with how to use Twitter to generate traffic to your site I thought it would be appropriate to get you up to date with the lingo people use on Twitter, so here’s guide to the major Twitter Lingo:

• @username – This is a form of conversation on Twitter and is used in one of 2 ways. The first way is a @reply where your status update starts with the @username, this basically directs the tweet you are doing to that user. The second way is a mention where you included @username in your tweet but not at the start.
• #topic – This is called a “hashtag”, which is a way of grouping Twitter status updates by keyword. People are about to search Twitter using hashtags which allows them to see all updates containing the tag
• DM – A private tweet or Direct Message sent to you using Twitter, these do not appear in the public timeline and can only be seen by the person it was sent to
• Favourite – This is similar to bookmarking a webpage, it allows you to mark tweets as your favourites so you can view them later
• Follower – Someone who “subscribes” to have your status updates show up in their Twitter stream. This is similar to someone subscribing to receive your emails, it’s just more frequent.
• RT or ReTweet – Similar to forwarding an email, a RT is passing on someone’s elses status update to your followers. This is generally recognized by doing a RT @username followed but their status update.
• Tweet – A 140 Character status update sent to Twitter. Tweets are public and can be viewed by your followers and in the public Twitter stream.
• TweetUp – A face to face meet up with people that you have met and interacted with on Twitter.

So that is all the major lingo used each day on Twitter to describe your actions and updates. If I missed anything feel free to add them in the comments below.