What is Twitter?

How many times have you found yourself in a situation where people around you keep talking about twitter and tweets, you may be wondering, what the hell it is! Well don’t beat yourself over it anymore because you have opened the perfect page that will fully explain twitter to you.

First thing first, what is twitter? Well in simplest language it is a social network; an online community where people can share their thoughts, ideas and views without any restrictions.

Twitter was innovated in San Francisco in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, these four people worked in the Research and Development department of a podcasting company known as Odeo.

The senior management purchased the company and a new company known as obvious was initiated to run Twitter and Odea. On average 30000 people sign up for twitter everyday and the number of tweets has increased to 55 million per day; twitter is currently valued at 4 billion dollars.

All this facts indicate the rapid growth and success of twitter; I believe to keep up with the pace of the society and the technological advancements one must become a member of such an online social network and twitter is one of the best options.

Becoming a member of twitter is a simple procedure; it only involves clicking the sign up button and then keying in a username and password.

Once you have signed up you have to make a profile page where you can share as much information about yourself as you like, you can write about your hobbies, political and religious views, profession, marital status etc, the mode of sharing information is a 140 character long message known as a tweet.

Twitter provides with the option of customizing the profile page with some in-built themes that are located in the settings option right under the picture of the profile page on the right side toolbar, themes can also be purchased but I believe for new users the provided themes are good enough; themes make your profile page colorful, lively and personal.

You can upload a current photo of yourself to make your profile easy to locate and real, the next step would be to import your instant messenger contacts on twitter and then search for them to start building your network.

However for people who are interested in developing new contacts and relations there is the option of searching people on the twitter search engine by keying in your interest, as soon as you press search, twitter displays hundreds of people sharing same interests then you can select the ones you would like to contact or socialize with, socializing here means that you may open the profile page of a person you like, read about the information they have put up and if you wish to further communicate them, twitter also recommends people for you to follow, these people are active users that are selected randomly and suggested to new users.

Once you have started following friends (which simply mean that they are added in your twitter friends list) their tweets and updates will be displayed in your timeline or Twitter feed.

Many a times you will see that someone is filling up your timeline with sense less tweets, there is nothing to worry about in a situation like this because you can simply remove them from your timeline.

Twitter is not just a website that you visit to waste your time but it is an island of precious information and knowledge, all you have to learn is to identify treasure and junk.

All day long people share all kinds of information on twitter but to make your twitter experience more productive and knowledgeable only allow to display the tweets of people who share quality information.

To make twitter an amusing and interesting experience you must tweet regularly, especially during peak time (day time during the week), be sure you don’t come off as boring by not replying to questions that your followers have asked through tweets.

It is very important to keep your followers interested in you so they can keep sharing valuable information but in order to do so make your tweets worthwhile for them, don’t try too hard and come off as fake, try to keep the element of originality in the tweets and make them as real and personal as possible.

By tweeting regularly I certainly don’t mean you become annoying and share all the details about your day and eventually get removed from people’s timeline but what I am trying to say if you learn something informative then share that with your friends through tweets.

Last but not the least I hope the article has explained twitter to you completely and convinced you to engage in healthy tweeting.

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