Twitter.com commands just an estimated 32 per cent of all Twitter activity, which is incredibly low when you think about. Imagine if Facebook boasted that kind of share for their 200-million strong audience; people would be talking. And with complete justification.

(This low number also, incidentally, explains in part the recent hype – and reaction – to Twitter’s 60% drop-off rate amongst new users, as Nielsen, who took the measurements, only accounted for Twitter.com, and not all the external clients, which make up the bulk of all interactions with the service, certainly from seasoned members.)

There’s a good reason why – Twitter.com is an entirely limiting way to interact with the Twitter stream. That statement, true as it is, is pretty insane for any website, let alone a social media platform. Somehow, Twitter gets away with it; at least, for now.

Even the most basic functionality from the site is missing. I’ve discussed recently on this blog the importance of the re-tweet, an event that takes place millions of times a day within the Twitter stream. So frequently, in fact, that’s it’s an accepted part of the experience, but Twitter.com, despite many upgrades, hasn’t considered it significant enough to provide us with a re-tweet button. Has the world gone mad?

Perhaps, but there is a solution. In fact, there are three.

Why Do We Need A Re-Tweet Button?

If you’re unsure of the significant of the re-tweet, please read my article, “In Defense Of The Re-Tweet.”

Okay, like me, you might predominately use TweetDeck or a different Twitter client for all your networking. That’s great, even admirable. But think of everybody else. Lots of folk have to use Twitter.com – maybe they’re restricted at work, or their computer isn’t powerful enough to run an external client.

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On Twitter I am often asked by followers for information that can be passed on to new folk they have introduced to the network. Twitter can be intimidating the first time you sign up and unless you’re fairly proactive the benefits of the platform can easily be lost.

I’ve written many tutorials, guides and ‘how to’ articles on this blog, and felt it made sense to pool these entries into one convenient resource: Twitter 101.

Twitter 101 breaks down all the help articles within Twittercism into clearly-labelled sub-sections.You can access my guides on Getting Started, Twitter Etiquette, Finding Followers and  Statistics & Data, as well as tutorials on #followfriday and TweetDeck, tips on designing your profile background and instruction on how to fight off spammers and trolls.

You can find the link to this section at the top of the screen. The page will be updated continuously as new material is published.

If you have introduced friends to Twitter and they’re not ‘getting it’, please forward them towards my Twitter 101 page. The full URL is:

• http://twittercism.com/twitter-101/

Thank you!

There’s been some talk of late in blogs and on Friendfeed that the humble re-tweet might be, in fact, at best stupid, worse, a nuisance. As Louis Gray writes in his piece:

“Twitter is a land where 140 characters is all you’ve got to express yourself. If you think you don’t have enough interesting data to share 140 characters of your own, but instead need to piggyback on someone else’s tweet, then maybe you should rethink why you’re using the service.”

Louis earlier suggested that begging for re-tweets is lazy; that repeating what somebody else has said doesn’t add anything to the conversation.

He isn’t alone; Dave Winer and others this week have been beating the re-tweet into submission, suggesting that what Twitter needs is the ‘like’ service that other social networks use (Friendfeed, Digg, Reddit etc).

While I agree that there are right and wrong ways to re-tweet submissions – or, indeed, to ask for them to be re-submitted from your followers – I think completely dismissing the re-tweet is misguided. It serves a purpose on Twitter that makes it unique to that platform.

The Re-Tweet Gives Credit

However you choose to re-submit a tweet – using RT, re-tweet or via (I will address the differences later) – it’s important that credit is given to the original poster. The re-tweet does this effectively and with a minimal waste of characters.

Additionally, the re-tweet is (or should/can be) an endorsement of the person, too. When I re-tweet somebody I’m fairly mindful about whom it is I’m re-tweeting. Even the most obnoxious ass is capable of at least one good tweet, much like every amateur is capable of one pro golf shot. It doesn’t mean the rest was up to par. I take that into consideration when I RT; I’m saying to you, this content is good, and this is a good guy.

Because you give credit, the original poster has an excellent chance of picking up some new followers and meeting some new folk. And vice versa.

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(This is a follow-up article to the post, “How To Use Twitter To Leverage Your Blog (Part One).”)

In the first part of this article, I wrote about how the impact of the StalkDaily and Mikeyy worm exploits on Twitter were, in a roundabout way, beneficial to this blog. By providing timely and helpful material to folks who were infected by the worms, I received an enormous amount of re-tweets, traffic and praise on Twitter and around the internet, and this blog’s ’status’ rose considerably.

In this post I will share what I learned about this experience. Can anyone use Twitter to leverage their blog? Is Twitter a great source of traffic? Will Twitter followers become part of your blog’s community, and even subscribe?

Yes, yes and yes, and it can all be achieved by observing a few simple steps.

Build Your Twitter Profile

This one is a no-brainer, right? Without lots of followers, there’s not much point in sharing your own content, is there? Well, yes and no. I think it’s far more important to have the right types of people following you than to have an enormous amount of folk who have little to no interest in what you tweet about. Would you rather have five hundred followers who regularly clicked on your links and engaged with you and your content, or ten thousand who rarely did and didn’t care either way?

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When you start to follow a large number of accounts on Twitter, it makes sense to optimise that user base to ensure it’s as efficient as possible.

There really is no point in following:

1. Spammers
2. People who ignore you
3. People who tweet content that’s of absolutely no interest to you
4. People who never tweet at all

This article will focus on how you can remove this last group from your network.

How To Find Inactive Twitter Accounts

Yesterday I wrote about how you can use the statistical data on Twitter-Friends.com to analyse your presence on the Twitter network. We’re going to use one of the many features on this site today to clean up our inactive followers.

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