Twitter Avatars This is the image associated with your Twitter account. Whether you use a photo of yourself or a logo depends on what you want to use Twitter for. If you are promoting a company or charity, the key element is the logo. If you use Twitter to chat to other people (who you might also meet at a conference, etc.) , then it's sensible to have a photograph that's immediately recognisable. If you don't want to use a photograph of yourself, choose some abstract image that people will come to associate with you, but best to steer clear of the little cartoony faces which tend to look much the same. (Dump the 'egg image' that is assigned by twitter when you sign up - it signals 'newbie'.)
Twitter hashtags The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. There are three sites that can tell you more about specific hashtags, though they all try and do slightly different things. They are: www.hashtags.org and www.twubs.com and www.tagdef.com.
Track retweets? (1) Sign in to your Twitter account and in the search bar type 'RT@accountname' and then you can select 'top' to see the most re-tweeted ones. (2) Retweetrank (www.retweetrank.com) lets you see how you rank with other Twitter users in terms of retweets. (3) use a tool called Tweetreach (http://tweetreach.com).
Tweetping (www.tweetping.net) provides a real time visualisation of tweets from around the world. The presentation is very high tech and it's quite astonishing, not to say hypnotic. It's only value seems to be to show how busy Twitter is, but it's worth a look.
Phil Bradley in CILIP Update (various dates)
