More and more companies are using twitter as a way to promote their products/services by offering competitions and giveaways.

Twitter is not anywhere near as complicated as you might think. If you can use forums or facebook you will have no problem using twitter. It’s just a different way of communicating.

Sign up for a Twitter account at: https://twitter.com/signup

My twitter account: http://twitter.com/kijolo

How twitter works:

If you’re familiar with facebook then imagine that twitter is just like reading facebook status updates … except on twitter they’re called “tweets”.

On twitter you have “followers”. This is people (tweeters) that interest you (like friends on facebook).

Anything that the people you follow post, will show up on your timeline (this is viewable by clicking the “Home” link on your twitter account). The more people you follow the more posts there will be on your timeline.

Anything that you post will appear on your timeline, plus on the timeline of anyone that follows you.

How to post on twitter:

When you are logged into twitter click on the “home” link and this takes you to your time line. At the top, on the left you will see a box that says ‘compose new tweet’
This is where you can type your message (tweet). Your message will need to be no more than 140 characters (the 140 in the top right decreases as you type each letter so you know when you’re running out of characters).

Now to break down a “tweet”:

How to follow someone:

(I am going to use @gowercottage as an example for the next few posts – I’m not affiliated to them in anyway though! Ignore their question for now too)

Normally to enter a competition you will need to follow the person/company (tweeter) who is running the competition. You will probably want to follow other ‘compers’ too as this is how you will discover new competitions.

Following someone is very simple. When you see their post (which will look something like below) click on their name:

This takes you to their twitter page and all you need to do is click the “follow” button

From now on, each time they post, it will appear in your timeline.

How to reply to a ‘tweet’:

If you want to reply to someone this is also very simple to do. Just below their tweet you will see the reply option. Simply click that and it will take you to your text box, where you can write your reply.

and it will automatically include their twitter @name so that they can see your reply.

easy huh?!

How to “Retweet” (RT) something:

A lot of competitions simply require you to “retweet” (RT) the message. This is also very simple to do. Next to the reply option there is a “retweet” option. Simply click this and your post is retweeted!

You can also retweet by simply copying and pasting the message into the text box at the top of your home page. Don’t forget to include their @name

Including “Hashtags”

In the gowercottage example you will see that they have used some words/phrases preceded by the hashtag:

A hashtag is twitters way of “grouping” a message. If you click on the hashtag text (on twitter) it will take you to all messages that feature that hashtag like this:

Hashtags are used for competition entries, as an easy way to track the entries.

So now onto the fun part, entering competitions!

Using the gowercottage as an example:

Prior to posting their comp they tweeted

“1 guess per person followed by the tag #freeleebyrne for FREE Brownies, question coming up in 5 minutes…”

Then the question was posted

“Today’s #mondaymayhem Q for Free Brownies is, last week I was on Radio 2 with Jeremy Vine, how many hits did my website get? #freeleebyrne”

So to enter this, you would need to follow and then reply to gowercottage with your guess and include the hashtags #freeleebyrne #mondaymayhem

Normally each tweet will give you instructions on how to enter. One I entered this morning (and then won) was for the first 90 people to email them (and they provided their email address). Others may want you to “RT” (retweet as explained above) or they might want you to “DM” (direct message) them (note: they have to be following you to be able to message them… they often forget this when posting their comp )!

And finally:

To find out if anyone has mentioned/replied to you, click on ‘Connect’ and check your ‘interactions’ and ‘mentions’

Best of luck!