Review: Twitter Essential Training

I’ve used Twit­ter spar­ingly for a cou­ple of years. Dur­ing big, live events like an earth­quake in CA and an approach­ing tsunami for Japan, I find Twit­ter invalu­able. Day to day, though, I wasn’t quite into it until I got a smart phone and envi­sioned the pos­si­bil­i­ties a lit­tle more.

It was time to get more knowl­edge, so I turned to Lynda.com and their begin­ning class: Twit­ter Essen­tial Train­ing.” It’s taught by Maria Langer who is easy to fol­low, thor­ough, and has a very pleas­ant speak­ing voice.

The class cov­ers every­thing from sign­ing into a new account, retweet­ing, @mentions, and lists — one of my favorites for keep­ing who you are fol­low­ing orga­nized. It cov­ers sev­eral 3rd party prod­ucts includ­ing some for sched­ul­ing tweets, using Twit­ter with a mobile phone, or using it con­gru­ently with other social media.

Using Twit­ter with images was com­pletely new to me and very valu­able. (I should know these things since a con­gress­man recently resigned over the mis­use of this fea­ture.) I now fol­low Maria, which is a great way to see all these var­i­ous fea­tures in action. She’s a won­der­ful role model for using Twit­ter to its fullest, and with 32K tweets under her belt (wow!), she’s earned it.

My favorite part of the course was when she talked about the friend­ships that she’s devel­oped, 140 char­ac­ters at a time, and how she uses it with busi­nesses to effect change…and gets results. Power to the peo­ple, man!

I really enjoyed learn­ing about Twit­ter eti­quette as well. After all, when one tweets to the world, no one may read your tweet, but every­one can read your tweet for ever more, so you don’t want to make a fool of your­self or offend.

There’s so much more than what I men­tion here. So if you want to learn more about Twit­ter from the ground up, this course is a great way to learn a lot.

Just one more thing (homage to the recently deceased Peter Falk)…if you take the course and you hear a men­tion of the Ven­tura pier, know that back in the 70s dur­ing my Jr. Life­guard train­ing, I jumped from that pier.

(To find the course, head here. You can sam­ple a few links for free, but you need to be a mem­ber to take the full course [worth it!])