by Jo Linsdell

Created on: February 16, 2010

Twitter is a real time social media networking site that lets people from all over the world share and discover "what's happening now".

Members have 140 characters with which to update their status bar on site. How you use it is completely up to you. You might want to use it for work purposes or as a marketing tool and create a network with thousands or just to stay in touch with a few close friends and share a few details about your life and interests.

To sign up for your free twitter account navigate to http://twitter.com/ and select the green "Sign up now" button on the right hand of your screen. You will need to fill out a simple on-line form.

Your user-name can be your real name, a nickname, business name or a word that best describes your interests. This will be the name your followers use when sending @replies, direct messages, or Re-tweets.  It will also form the URL of your home time-line e.g. www.twitter.com/username

Once you have selected an appropriate user-name, you will be asked to enter a password. Once you have entered a sufficiently strong password you'll need to provide an email address.  Twitter uses this to confirm your account before you can finish the sign-up process.

Next click create account and you're ready to start tweeting.

Look for people with similar interests to follow or if you prefer let twitter scan your email address book  in order to find contacts that are also using Twitter.  When the scan is complete, Twitter will show you a list of the friends and colleagues it found in your address book.  You can choose to follow all of them by selecting the blue 'Follow All' button on the right hand side of the results, or if you'd like to see updates only from specific people, you can choose to follow your email contacts individually using the grey 'follow' button next to their information. 

Tweeters use hash-tags to identify tweets that have a similar topic. Just type # followed by your tag at the end of your status update and the search system will easily identify your post with everything on that particular subject.  Type your hash tag into twitter Search and it will give you results for all the people that have tweeted it.

Other features of your twitter account include; direct messages (which lets you sent and receive private messages of 140 characters), Favourites (that lets you select your favourite tweets) and Lists (which allow you to make groups of tweeters).

There are of course thousands of applications that can be used with twitter to enhance your tweeting experience. Here are a few of my favourites:

http://thenextweb.com/TwitterKeys/keys.php Allows you to add special graphics and other symbols to your tweets.

http://www.twibs.com Features the top-followed businesses on Twitter.

http://www.twitrbackgrounds.com/ selection of free Twitter backgrounds.

http://vidly.com/ post videos to twitter

http://twitdoc.com/ share your documents on Twitter.

http://www.twitterfreeicon.com Free twitter icons for your web pages.

Twitter is fast becoming one of the top social media sites on the internet. Join the twitter revolution today!

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