by Anne Stone

Created on: May 01, 2009

Why Twitter? Many people who stumble in to Twitter fail to understand what the attraction is, in fact 60% of new members give up after the first month. The other 40% evidently become addiction to social network site of 140 characters or less.
So if you are coming into Twitter for the first time what should you do?

First you need to adapt your profile page. Add a photo or avatar, give a little bit of info about yourself. It doesn't have to be much but when people look you up they want to know a little about you to see if they are interested in befriending you.

You can also use your profile page to organize your e-mail notifications and add your mobile phone if it is compatible.Your profile page will also show all your tweets (anything you type into your chat box.)

Next step is to build up your own network of friends. To do this you have to follow people. This means finding people who interest you by looking at their profiles and clicking the follow button. Then every time they make a statement it will appear on your Twitter home page.

To find people who interest you it's probably a good place to start by searching for a celebrity or author you admire and then check who's following them? Or you can search for friends or family by their names or user names. You can also search for topics you are interested and find people who are talking about those topics. Check out other's profiles and if they interest you click the follow button. A lot of the time they will follow back but don't expect this of celebrities.

Once you have followed a few people it's important to start sending out your own little messages, or Tweets. It doesn't really matter what you say but if you keep to what you find interesting then the people who follow you back will most likely share your interests.

On your home page you will recieve the Tweets from those you are following, you can answer them at anytime with one click on the arrow in their Tweet box. This is how you make friends on Twitter and build up your network.

Messages sent directly to someone else will have @ before their username. These messages can be seen by all who share the same friends. If you want to send a more private message then you can use the Direct Message option. This can only be seen by the person you are sending the message to.

As your network gets bigger you will have more and more people to chat to and socialise with. You can talk about anything, play games, do quizzes and competitions. By using associated sites like Twitpic,

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