What is Twitter and how do I use it?

What is Twitter?

Twitter lets you publish short messages - just like mobile phone text messages – on the internet and connect with other interesting people. Millions of people use the service.

You can have fascinating online conversations and share information, thoughts, links, photos and comments.

It’s amazing what you can say with a few 140-character messages.

Sign up, follow a few people you’re interested in and they might follow you back (although there’s no obligation to do so of course). Then you start tweeting (writing messages) and sharing.

Obviously people use Twitter in different ways.

How do I use Twitter?

Twitter is a lot of fun and I enjoy tweeting:

1. to talk about interesting things with interesting people;
2. to share my own thoughts;
3. to share links to interesting articles.

I tend to follow others on Twitter if they use it in a similar way to me, regardless of the subject of their tweets.

I don’t follow everyone who follows me, even if they’re interested in areas that I blog about.

I will almost definitely follow you back if you are interested in what I blog about and you regularly:

1. Tweet interesting thoughts and links;
2. Share other people’s interesting thoughts and links;
3. Use Twitter for conversation with other users;

If you don’t use Twitter like this, the chances of me following you back are pretty slim. It’s nothing personal: the more people you follow, the more your Twitter timeline fills up with messages and the harder it is to keep up.

If you want to get in touch with me via Twitter and we’re not following each other, just include ‘@matthewbennett’ in your tweet and I’ll reply.

Follow Matthew on Twitter.