You must have heard about it by now! It is a social media tool where you chat about anything you want to, you can be sociable or tweet about specialisms, totally down to you what you wish to chat about. You are limited to 140 characters so you have to choose your chats or ‘tweets’ carefully to get your point across.

I just love to tweet about stuff! It could be from my thoughts in a particular moment, catching up between friends, giving tips, motivational quotes, advice and so much more.

When setting up a twitter account think about your user name, what is it that you will use your twitter account for. If you are branding yourself or products for your business, it is best to use your own name, or the ‘brand or website’ you wish to promote to people on the web. Now listen up, by ‘branding’ I do not mean your products, you always should be looking at branding YOU first and foremost. If you market yourself correctly the products will sell. People want to know the real you, not the SALES you.

Your audience on twitter can be as varied or specific as you want it to be, totally down to you who you accept as a ‘follower’ or not. You can follow people who are of interest to you, and likewise you are able to see who wants to follow you. There can be some unsavoury characters on twitter, but there is the functionality to ‘block’ a user and report them as ‘spammers’.

It is best to try to connect with other ‘tweeple’ socially and interact where possibly rather than try to ‘sell’ them stuff – this can be considered as spamming and is not acceptable on twitter.

If you are a student and you are stuck with an essay or dissertation, throw out the question to Twitterland and as for opinions – you will soon get floods of replies. Similarly if you wish to seek advise or engage with other ‘tweeple’ throw out a question or phrase or statement and see what comes back.

If you want to show appreciation to what others have ‘tweeted’ about you can share or otherwise known as re-tweet or RT the information, to your own list. This will include a sending the information to other users possibly not in your following group.

Hash marks are used to ‘group together’ a topic of interest, for instance #selfmotivation you can use these in your tweets as a form of ‘key word’ search. Users can search on hash tags which will group the topics together and show all relevant tweets that are in the #selfmotivation range for instance.

You can add photos and URL links to tweets, but in some instances it is best to shorten the links as this uses up the valuable 140 characters. There are sites that can shorten links for you so research this online through any search engine.

Try and give value in the messages you are sending out on twitter people love useful information NOT Business SPAM! I hope you have found this information useful. Please let me know by leaving me a comment below.