What Is Twitter & How Does It Work?
Twitter is an online news and social networking site where people communicate in short messages called tweets. Tweeting is posting short messages for anyone who follows you on Twitter, with the hope that your messages are useful and interesting to someone in your audience. Another description of Twitter and tweeting might be microblogging.
Some people use Twitter to discover interesting people and companies online, opting to follow their tweets.
Why Twitter Is So Popular
In addition to its relative novelty, Twitter’s big appeal is how scan-friendly it is: You can track hundreds of interesting Twitter users and read their content with a glance. This is ideal for our modern attention-deficit world.
Twitter employs a purposeful message size restriction to keep things scan-friendly: every microblog tweet entry is limited to 280 characters or less. This size cap promotes the focused and clever use of language, which makes tweets easy to scan, and challenging to write. This size restriction made Twitter a popular social tool.
How Twitter Works
Twitter is easy to use as either broadcaster or receiver. You join with a free account and Twitter name. Then you send broadcasts (tweets) daily, hourly, or as frequently as you like. Go to the What’s Happening box, type 280 or fewer characters, and click Tweet. People who follow you, and potentially others who don’t, will see your tweet.
Encourage people you know to follow you and receive your tweets in their Twitter feeds. Let your friends know you are on Twitter to slowly build up a following. When people follow you, Twitter etiquette calls for you to follow them back.
To receive Twitter feeds, find someone interesting (celebrities included) and press Follow to subscribe to their tweets. If their tweets aren’t as interesting as you thought they’d be, select Unfollow.
Go to your account at Twitter.com day or night to read your Twitter feed, which is constantly changing as people post.
Twitter is that simple.
