Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

 

The video above is a nice visual explanation of why people use twitter (for personal reasons) and how it works.

To learn more about what Twitter is continue reading.

 

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an on-line service that allows you to broadcast short (140 character max) messages called 'tweets' to different audiences depending on your privacy settings. 

Once you have signed up for your free twitter account on twitter.com, you can send tweets directly through your personal twitter homepage or, as I do, use a third party app or tool to send tweets without having to log in to your twitter page. The third-party tool that I use for twitter is called Hootsuite.  We'll get into how to use third-party tools later.

When you send a tweet it shows up in 3 places:

  1. In the public twitter timeline (unless you choose to disable this feature in your settings),
  2. On your twitter homepage, and
  3. On the homepages of people who choose to connect with your account by "following" you.  The people who 'follow' your account are called followers.
Once you have found and followed your friends, colleagues, or other people who you find interesting, their tweets will show up on your Twitter homepage.

In short, Twitter is a way to keep up with what your your friends are doing, find interesting or have questions about.  As a business you can broadcast promotions, link to interesting articles on your website, run a contest, or invite your followers to an event.

People have found many clever uses for Twitter.  If you are interested read the next post about How to set up your Twitter account.  If you're still not sure, post a question in the comments below and we'll do our best to answer it.

 

 

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