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.

Have anything to say about Twitter, do not hesitate to share it using the comment form below this post.

Cheers !!!.