Since January of this year, we’ve noticed an exponencial growth of Twitter in our region, that was one if the reasons which made us develop the project Belém-Te-Vi, a place to filter real-time tweets written by Belém residents. However, aside this high rates of Twitter usage we noticed a certain misunderstanding on how to use it and so we prepared a few orientations.

How to use Twitter:

• Twitter is above all, a tool for communications, therefore what you write is being read by other people;
• Twitter must not be used for mass marketing, people will only read your texts if it is interesting for them;
• Titter is not a chat, if intend to talk a private subject with someone via Twitter instead of instant messengers like MSN Messenger, then use Direct Messages, nobody is obliged to read your private conversations;
• “What are you doing” is not an  order, few people want to know what you had for breakfast, but many would love that you indicated the link of the site you’re currently reading;
• Networking: answer to your collegues question and make new contacts, all of this is possible through Twitter;

Twitter Best Practices:

• Use URL shorteners to suggest links like the brazilian migre.me or bit.ly;
• Use RT to Retweet other users Ex.: RT @sbvirtual etc
• Make use of hashtags for a better classification of your texts. Hashtags are like keywords we can create and indicate trough the symbol #. A hashtag about SB Virtual would be #sbvirtual;
• If your Twitter account is for corporative usage, then listen to what your followers say about you, answer and engage with them;
• Avoid using scripts to adding more followers. This is a practice not very well seen by the community;
• Describe yourself through the Bio and the avatar too;
• Twitter is not limited to its own website, explore other softwares like TweetDeck, Twhirl, TwitterFox or other sites like Twitzap, Belém-te-vi, Blablabra.

Chris Brogan also wrote a etiquette guide for Twitter that is worhty checking.

And you, how do you use Twitter? What other practices do you suggest or disagree?