by Melanie Grimes

Created on: April 15, 2008   Last Updated: February 08, 2011

Twitter is a great new social networking tool. It is a great way to stay in touch with and stay connected to friends. Twitter is easy to learn, especially if you are familiar with text messaging and instant messaging.You can send and receive messages on a desktop or on a phone. You can use Twitter to check the web, invite friends to meetings, or just let people know where you are and what you are doing or what you are thinking.

Getting Started with Twitter
Getting started is easy. The sign up procedure gives you an option of checking for any other Twitter members who are currently in your email phone book. This speeds up the process of finding people to follow. Then, all you do is answer the question in the box labeled "What are you doing?" and turn on your mobile phone.

How do you twitter?
When you twitter, your messages are limited to 140 characters. You can select who sees your messages, making them either public or private. Then, you can find people to "follow", that is, you can become their fan and subscribe to their twittering. Then, every time that person sends out a twitter, you will receive it.You can find people to follow, much like you do on Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

Twitter is free, but...
Be careful of cell phone charges. If you don't have unlimited text messaging on your phone, you could find yourself with a large phone bill.

Twitter Speak
Twitter has developed its own language. You can find more information about this on the twitter blog page. Here is a sample.
Tweet= a message
Twoosh= A tweet that is exactly 140 words long
Twude= a guy using twitter
Tweetup is meeting offline with people from twitter

Numerous add-on applications for Twitter have recently been launched, and many are still in development. One of the new ones is Chacha. Chacha is like Twitter, but it is a site for asking questions. Check for new friends who may have joined, via your email lists. The more connections you have, the more others will want to follow you.

Find people with similar interests and invite follow them, and invite the to follow you. Don't twitter too much or too little. You want to be memorable but not annoying. FInd ways to make your twitters memorable, worth noting, and worth following. Send links to any updates to your blog. Twitter is easy to use and provides a great way to keep in touch with friends minute-by-minute, let others know what you are doing, then share information across a broad social network.

Learn more about this author, Melanie Grimes.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.