Twitter 101: Twitter Terminology Glossary

12 July

We’re taught in school to learn our ABC’s and 123’s. In this week’s installment of our Twitter 101 series, we present a glossary of Twitter terminology:

@ Reply - also known as a mention, a tweet that is directed at another Twitter user or series of users.
Avatar - the profile picture of each Twitter user that shows up next to each of their tweets.
Direct Message - a private message that can be sent between two accounts, as long as both accounts are following each other.
Handle - a Twitter user’s name.
Hash-tag - A series of letters or words appearing after the pound (#) sign. A hash-tag can be unique to a tweet (such as, I just ran three blocks and caught the bus #justmadeit) or more popularized where many users use the same hash-tag (It’s my first day of sophomore year #college #Class of 2014).
Hootsuite - a popular web-based application for managing single or multiple Twitter accounts. Includes advanced analytic tools as well as features to pre-set the publishing of tweets at a certain date and time.
List - a feature of a user’s Twitter account that allows them to organize their followers. Other users can then elect to follow an entire list or just review the tweets from those on that list.
Ratio - the difference between the number of twitter followers a user has and the number of users they are following.
Timeline - a live feed of all the tweets sent from the handles a user is following.
Tweet - a 140-character message posted to a user’s Twitter profile.
TweetDeck - a popular desktop application for managing a user’s Twitter account, or multiple Twitter accounts. Through a series of customizable columns, a user can easily follow incoming tweets according to different categories.
URL Shortener - applications, such as bit.ly or tinyurl, that allow for the shortening of web addresses into shorter links for inserting into a tweet.

Chris Golden is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of myImpact.org- an online platform and Twitter based application for volunteers to record, share and track their impact. Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisGolden. He’s served for two years as official Twitter correspondent for the National Conference on Citizenship, speaks frequently on social media to student, young leader and non-profit audiences and was invited to NASA Tweetups at the Kennedy Space Center for the STS-133 and STS-135 launches and the first White House Twitter Town Hall with President Obama.

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