Twitter Tips and Jargon for Toronto Real Estate Agents

Avatar: Your Twitter profile picture.
Follow: When you follow someone on Twitter, their tweets will show up on your home page when you log in to your account.
Followers: These are the people who are following your tweets. Your tweets will appear on their home pages when they log into their account.
@username + message: This directs a tweet at another person, and causes your tweet to be saved under that user’s “@Mentions” tab. It will look like this: @bsage I love that module on Twitter.
d username + message: This will send a direct message to someone on Twitter. This is like sending an email – only the recipient will see it.
RT @<username>: Retweet someone else’s tweet.
#<term>: This adds a hashtag in order to tag a tweet with a search term. The hashtag is usually placed at the beginning of the tweet. You will often find the hashtag used at events and conferences to help attendees organize themselves and make it easy to search for content that others are tweeting about the event. 
140 Characters: These is the maximum number of characters that a tweet can consist of.
Shorten URLs: In order to save on characters used in your tweets, you can shorten a lengthy URL into a much shorter one.  Bit.ly is a great website to use for this and it allows you to track how many times the link was clicked on.
Tweet(ing): The act of posting to Twitter.
Tweetup: An in-person meet-up between Twitter members.
Twitpic.com and instagram.com: There’s no way to attach a photo to your tweets as you would to an email. However, there are a number of third-party platforms to help you to upload and share photos easily. Twitpic.com is one of the most popular sites for this, or you can simply share a shortened link to wherever the photo lives online if it has a URL. Instagram.com is quickly becoming the tool of choice. The great thing about Instagram is that you can choose to have the option “View Photo” appear under your tweet; then, when somone clicks on this, they can see the photo.
Hootsuite is a great third-party platform that has been created to make it easier for you to manage the conversations going on within your Twitter network.