Christmas Survival Guide for Twitter

Jon Bishop — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:58:37 +0000

So you would like to celebrate Christmas and the holidays on Twitter? Well so do I so I’m putting together this little post to gather my thoughts. Here are some things you can do to help get into the Christmas spirit with your Twitter account.

Decorate Your Twitter Photo

Turn your Twitter Photo into an elf or Santa and even add some snow with Twixenate or add a Santa hat with Twibbon.com ( Other Christmas twibbons).

Change Your Twitter Background

You can always decorate your current background with some snow in Photoshop or use one of these templates:

Help People In Need

The holidays are a time to give and help where you can. On Twitter you can join a cause like the #twismas movement to raise money for a child or follow some popular charities on Twitter like:

Also be sure to check out TwitCause.

View Christmas Pictures

Using TweetGrid you can see all photos being posted to Twitter about Christmas in one place … and you don’t even have to update the page.

Track and Tweet With Santa

Norad has a special website and a Twitter account dedicated to helping you track Santa on his busiest day of the year. Also be sure to check what I believe to be the real Santa Claus on Twitter. Also, don’t forget to keep up with his blog.

- Photo by Steve took it

Twitter 101

Jon Bishop — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:26:00 +0000

Everything you need to know about Twitter in as short of a post as possible.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. – From Wikipedia

Commoncraft also has a pretty good explanation of what twitter is on youtube.

Here are some Twinterviews about what people love about twitter.

Who do I follow?

First thing you can do is invite all of your friends through Twitters Find & Follow page. Once that is done you can move on to websites like Who Should I Follow, Twittersearch and Twubble. (More Twitter Search Engines)

There are also lists you can scan through at TwitterPack and Twitterholic as well as some Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter.

It is probably a good idea to view a users Twitter page before you follow them to be sure they aren’t spam.

How do i update?

There are A LOT of ways to update your twitter status. The most obvious (and sometimes most reliable) is the Twitter site itself.

There is also an array of third-party apps to help feed your twitter hunger:

Or you can automate the process with TwitterFeed.

Where else can i put my twitter feed?

You can view your feed in any feed aggregator (Google Reader, FriendFeed, Outlook, etc). Your feed can be accessed at

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.rss – Your Feed
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/username.rss – Your Friends Feed

as well as by clicking the RSS button at the bottom of your Twitter page.

Another popular thing to do is add your Twitter feed to facebook. Twitter has its own Facebok App or you can just sync your facebook satus with Twitter. I personally chose to use FriendFeed because it was the least intrusive.

What are some cool apps I can use?

Check out the Twitter Fan Wiki Apps Page.

I hope someone found this informative. Please feel free to follow me: @spazcer