What is Twitter all about?
It seems you cant swing a dead cat without hitting somebody that’s talking about Twitter. Twitter this… Twitter that… tweet this… tweet that. What’s the deal with Twitter? Why is the entire country going crazy about Twitter? In this post I will briefly discuss what Twitter is and why it’s so popular, and then in a follow-up post I will outline why Twitter is so valuable to folks with online businesses.
Twitter in a nutshell:
Imagine if you could send text messages via your phone to the entire world, and in turn you could read text messages from people that you were interested in anywhere in the world – that’s Twitter.
Twitter is a microblogging website. It allows you to send out small messages as frequently as you like from wherever you are in the world.
With Twitter registration is simple and quick. You have your own profile page (sorta like your own home page), where you can make short posts – 140 characters or less. You can make these posts via your internet browser or with your cell phone via a text message. There are tons of other tools that you can use to make Twitter posts (tweets) and I will discuss some of those tools in future posts. There is a text entry window on Twitter with the call to action… “What are you doing?”, simply type in what you are doing and then click “update”… you have just made a tweet. People make all sorts of tweets, from the extremely trivial to the extremely important such as updates from people who are in the middle of a breaking news story.
Twitter allows you to “follow” people that might interest you. In other words, you decide what tweets you want to see. Follow your favorite musician, actor, politician, professor, subject matter expert, as well as following your friends and family.
Prior to Twitter and microblogging people would read blogs and news websites to stay up to date on the things that interested them. The limitation with blogs and news websites is that they are not updated that frequently. With Twitter, updates are made far more frequently and made by the source themselves! For instance, you might read on a blog that your favorite musician is preparing to a record a new CD which is interesting information, but on Twitter you could follow your favorite musicians progress every step of the way.
Just imagine updates like this…. “Today we recorded track 3 on our upcoming CD, this is track a sure fire hit! – Tom Petty”
You could have never received that type of information from any other source prior to the invention of Twitter.
So how do you find interesting people on Twitter? Again there are some great tools that I will discuss in future blog posts but the first thing you should try is to simply click the “find people” link on twitter. Type in who you are looking for, or a topic that interests you, and see if they are on Twitter. If they are, click follow, and from then on you will see their updates on your Twitter home page. You could also choose to have their updates sent to your cell phone as a text message which is of course super cool!
The advantages of Twitter go well beyond what I have discussed in this post but for sake of keeping things brief and simple I will save those things for future posts. In my next post I will discuss how Twitter can be used to help you grow your online business.
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