what twitter is all about

What Is Twitter and
Why Should I Use
Twitter?
Still
wondering what
Twitter is all about?
Well,Twitter is a
microblogging, social
networking website
which lets you write and read
messages of up to 140
characters
including all punctuations and
spaces.
At Twitter, all you simply have
to
be doing is to keep answering
the
question: "WHAT IS
HAPPENING?" .The messages,
which can't be more than 140
characters are known as
TWEETS.
Twitter works equally well from
your desktop or mobile phone
(m.twitter.com).
Before you get started, you can
just
try and go to
search.twitter.com
Then, in the search box, try
searching for your company or
a
few key topics in your field e.g
"Internet Marketer" . Check
through the result and this will
help
you get a sense of how you
want to
engage on Twitter.
So, How Do I Get Started?
To get started, just go to http://
twitter.com/signup and click on
the
SIGN UP link. Signing up for an
account takes just a few
minutes. To
help people recognize and trust
your account, fill out your
profile
( http://twitter.com/account/
settings) completely and even
include a picture.
Once you complete your
registration, you can start
TWEETING and FOLLOWING
people.
To find good people to follow,
go to
search.twitter.com and type in
keywords of your choice. In the
search results, you will see list
of
people related to the keyword
you
searched for. When you find a
good
candidate, look under their
picture
for the FOLLOW button. Click on
this and you will start receiving
their tweets.
Following somebody means
you
have agreed to be receiving
their
tweets. People that follow you
(i.e
FOLLOWERS) will also be
receiving
any tweet you post on twitter.
So, What Can I Be Tweeting?
Your tweets, which cannot be
more
than 140 characters, might be
anything which can be tips,
links to
interesting stuffs (news,article,
blogposts, pictures, music
downloads) etc People
following you
will also like it when you say hi,
respond to their questions,
comments, complaints and
jokes.
Any Terms To Familiarize Myself
With?
Yes, there are some terms you
will
need to familiarize yourself
with
for you to easily understand
how
twitter works. The major ones
are
highlighted below:
To FOLLOW somebody is to
subscribe to their messages.
A TWEET is an individual
message.
A DM or direct message is a
private
message on Twitter.
RT or RETWEET is to repost a
message from somebody else
on
Twitter
TRENDING TOPICS are the most-
discussed terms/topics on
Twitter at
any given moment.
@username is a public
message to or
about an individual on Twitter.
A hashtag - the # symbol
followed
by a term/word and included in
tweets - is a way categorizing
all
the posts on a topic.
Why Use Twitter?
You can use twitter to:
To build relationships with
people of
similar interest with yours.
To respond to comments and
questions from your followers
To ask questions and learn new
things
To post links to things people
would
find interesting
To retweet messages you
would like
to share
To respond to customer service
issues quickly if you have a
business
To engage in discussion on a
public
issue or a social cause etc.
Twitter keeps changing
everyday
and a lot of new stuffs keep
springing up day in day out. In
my
future posts, I will be writing
about
web applications built on
twitter
and also twitter tools you can
use
on your blog, website,myspace
etc.
More so, I will be talking about
how
to make money using twitter