by Lorelei Cohen

Created on: December 15, 2009   Last Updated: January 12, 2012

Twitter can be a powerful tool for keeping in touch with personal and business contacts. www.twitter.com is quite simply a free messenger service. It allows you to easily, and immediately send updates or, tweets throughout the day to those who you most want to receive them.

Twitter messages must be kept short in length and can be sent and received through web, instant message, or mobile text. Links which you include in your messages are automatically shortened to fit them into Twitter's numerical capacity.

You can begin using the program by opening your free account, this then allows you to send short messages, or tweets to anyone who chooses to visit your twitter account.  Friends or business associates can become followers of your account and this enables them to more quickly view your latest posts.

There are a large number of tools available on Twitter to help you create your network. From buttons, widgets, and banners that you can place on your social networking, business pages, or personal web pages. These tools insure that you have every opportunity available at your disposal for contacting the individuals that you have gathered within your network.

With the sheer variety of these buttons and widgets you can creatively link your twitter account to virtually any spot in cyberspace that you have a desire to. You can have your latest tweets posted on your websites, and a "tweet this" button placed on your blogs, or other webpages. It is now very easy to keep your contacts informed with updates, for any or all of the events, that occur throughout your day.

You can interconnect your Twitter account with numerous other sites. This includes social networking sites such as www.facebook.com,  www.myspace.com, www.gather.com as well as many others. This cross connecting enables you to send one message rather than multiple ones. You simple tweet your message at Twitter.com and it is then shared with the other sites that you have linked your Twitter account to. This linking of accounts saves you time in posting to the many people within your network. With one short simple message placed on Twitter your message is received on all your networking sites within a mere matter of minutes.

When using Twitter as a business tool keep in mind that tweeting URLs can become very impersonal. Your twitter account can easily begin to sound like a robot who insists on shooting out little bleeps and gleeps every hour or two. Try to keep the human aspect of messaging within

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