Twitter
What is it?
November 15, 2008
Twitter is a social media site that enables users to communicate with other users through tweets(more on this later). The idea is simple. Simply post what you are doing right now. If you’re like me, you are scratching your head asking yourself why would people I don’t even know care about what I am doing. But somehow it works.
How Does it Work?
Simply sign up at twitter.com. It’s a pretty straight forward process. Set up all of your account details, make sure you fill in your bio info. Design the page the way you like, and you’re ready to start tweeting.
Now the fun part. In Twitter, you follow people. You don’t need their permission, and you don’t need to ask for anything. Just find someone you like and click on follow. Now every time they post something, it appears on your page. The more people you follow, the more active your page will be. And the better your chances of people finding and following you.
Using Twitter
Welcome to micro-blogging. Micro-blogging is simple enough, blogging on a small scale. With Twitter, you are limited to 140 characters. This includes spaces, commas, periods, etc. Anything else will not be shown. You can use links, and there are ways of shortening the links so they don’t destroy your character limit. It forces you at times to really think about what to include in your posts, but makes it more pleasurable for the reader. I know I enjoy reading shorter posts.
There is a small arsenal of Twitter apps to make your experience better. A lot of them run on Adobe AIR, and have tons of functionality built in, like the shortening of URLs. I personally use Twhirl www.twhirl.org, which is a desktop app that runs almost like a IM/email hybrid. It updates itself every few minutes, and you can edit the settings for how often it runs that check. In addition to twitter updates, you can search for people, get your direct messages, and your replies right from Twhirl without ever visiting the website. You can look through the different apps at www.twitter.com/downloads.
Why Use it
When I started with Twitter I decided to give it two weeks, post once a day and see if I thought it was something I liked. It took 3 days and I found myself checking in on Twitter every few hours, or thinking to myself “I will definitely post this on Twitter as soon as I get a chance”. Which has the ability to be extremely easy with SMS. If you are unsure what SMS is, it stands for Short Message System, and is basically text messaging. You can set up Twitter on your mobile phone to accept and post updates. Very cool. And a lot of people use this functionality.
In addition to all of that, news hits Twitter extremely fast. Much faster than other media. Twitter has the potential to be a marketing machine if used properly. But keep in mind if all you post are your attempts to plug your blog or your website, your followers will drop you like a bad habit. No one wants to be targeted all the time.
Give Twitter a shot. I bet you’ll be hooked in no time, and find a lot of people that have interests in the same things as you. I would like a direct message or an email letting me know what you think.
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