When you hover over any tweet in your timeline you will see options to either reply or retweet. Twitter only becomes really useful when you use these two features to:

  • Start a conversation with someone
    When you click the reply button their username preceded by the @ symbol is automatically put at the start of your tweet. Any conversation using the @reply feature will be seen by anyone who follows both users.

  • Share an interesting tweet with your followers
    When you click the retweet button the whole tweet preceded by RT will be copied in to your next tweet. If there are enough characters left you can add a comment about why you find it interesting.

You can see any replies to and retweets of your tweets by clicking @yourusername in the navigation bar on the right of your timeline.

To participate in the conversation about a particular topic you can include a hashtag that will group all tweets on the subject together. We have created a hashtag for Oxford's 23 Things programme, it is #ox23.

  • Tweet about your experience using Twitter and include the 23 Things hashtag, #ox23

  • To view all tweets that inclide this hashtag go to http://search.twitter.com/ and run a search for #ox23

You can see the most popular topics on Twitter in the sidebar on your homepage under the heading "Trending Topics". Many of these will be hashtags.

And finally... write a post on your blog to show how you got on with the things this week!