Some more Twitter Tips

I know that lots of you have read and used my previousTwitter tips, but still have questions about using Twitter and entering Twitter comps, so based on the questions I've been asked over the last few weeks here are some more tips - I hope you find them helpful.

Favouriting Tweets

Have you ever had a tweet to say you have won a prize, then not been able to find the tweet again if, for instance, you want to thank the sender for the prize or, unfortunately, tell them it hasn't turned up? If you have the tweet stored in your favourites, you can find it quite simply by clicking on "Favourites" onyour Twitter home page.

To make a tweet into a favourite, just click on Favourite underneath the message. An orange triangle will appear on the top left and the message will be listed in your favourites. I put winning tweets into my favourites until the prize arrives: I then reply to the tweet to thank the sender and then click on "unfavourite" at the bottom of the message and it vanishes from my list. This is a great way of keeping track of whenther you are still  waiting for any prizes.

You can also favourite tweets for competitions that allow you more than one entry, but if you want to retweet them  again you will have to copy and paste them manually as Twitter will only let you retweet a message once. And that leads me on to.....

Copying and pasting tweets for Retweet competitions

A quick reminder that if you copy and paste a tweet instead of using the retweet function, you MUST start your tweet with RT @ and  the name of the original tweeter. If their name isn't in the tweet, they won't see your message, so however oftenyou tweet it you won't be entered  into the competition.   And what's more, other people may think that it is YOU who is running the competition and start retweeting your message.

If your entry is retweeted by another comper

all you need to do is find the tweet they retweeted and delete it. When a tweet is deleted, all retweets of it vanish. So you can cancel your tweet  to remove any retweets of it, and then tweet your entry again and hope it isn't retweeted a second time.

Shortening links

Sometimes you are asked to send a link, for instance to your favourite product on a website, but the link is far too long for Twitter's 140 characters. If you use Tweet Deck, it has a handy built in link shortener but if you  need to shorten it yourself, you can just paste the link into http://bit.ly/ and it will shorten it for you. Another link shortener is http://tinyurl.com/

"Tweet Deck moves too fast for  me!"

 If Tweet deck makes you feel seasick, click on the little spanner on the topright and then select "Twitter" and  untick "Enable real time streaming". Then you will be able to  read at your own pace and not be chasing tweets up and down your timeline!