If you’re new to twitter and need a guide as to what this is all about, please take a look at our other blog post “The phenomenon of twitter!”. For those of you that have made the jump and have a fully functional twitter account complete with an avatar and background image, but can’t understand all the acronyms that the people you’re following are using then this quick guide is for you:

Twitter Acronyms:

@ : This is what you use to reply to someone’s post, but if you already have a twitter account you should already know this. If you want to see what people have said as replies to you, login to your account and go to the twitter homepage (http://twitter.com/home ). You will then need to click the @yourusername in the right sidebar to see your replies.

RT: This stands for “ReTweet” and means that you are just sharing this tweet that you read from someone you’re following, with your followers

DM: This means “Direct Message” and is just like a PM in other social networks which stands for a “Private Message”. To get your DM’s go to the homepage of twitter when you’re logged in and click “Direct Messages” on the right sidebar.

PRT: This acronym can mean two things which makes it confusing. It can mean “Please ReTweet” or “Partial ReTweet”. I like to think of it as the former instead of the latter because who would really care if you amended a retweet anyway?

TMB: Tweet Me Back – If you really want a response this may help

ROFL: Rolling on the floor laughing – This is one of the man variations of LOL – laughing out loud

BTW: By the way – a good acronym for shortening something similar to PS – post script

#: Hashmarks – these are not meant to be an acronym to be used literally, but are a way to tag something so that when someone searches for a topic, the tweet that uses these for that particular grouping will show up. One example is “#haiku”. When you put this in the twitter search (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23haiku ) you can see who all of the haiku’s that were tagged with this hashmark phrase.