Twitter For Newbies

Twitter is a simple and easy-to-use micro blogging platform used to network with like-minded individuals and it's free to join. You're restricted to 140 characters - that's about twelve words; so it forces you to think when you write.

I chose it a few months ago because it's more user-friendly than Facebook or MySpace and it's a great place to link up with other business-minded people and connect with people in your area of interest.

While it's true that people publish some pretty inane stuff, it's not spam central and it's easy to block individuals who flood your mailbox with their messages.

Finding people to follow is easy in Twellow and you can unfollow people by expanding your Following list and clicking remove. Your Followers are people who find you interesting, usually from your profile, and decide to follow you. You can also use TweetLater, among others, for this purpose.  TwitterKarma does bulk follow or unfollow. 

To know more of the intricacies and subtleties of Twitter, I suggest you check out TwiTip and Mashable. Between these two sites you will be able to find out everything you need to know about Twitter!

Find people to follow in Twellow - it's a directory where you can search for people by area of expertise, profession or any other attribute listed in their personal profiles on Twitter.  Twellow is categorized by interest and you have twelve hundred characters for your bio, unlimited links.

I suggest that you:

• Complete your profile and add your website link.
• Use a real photo of yourself and your real name.
• Complete your bio and add your website link.
• Tweak your profile from time to time to observe the results, if any. I changed mine at least eight times before Followers started adding up.
• Read other tweets; find out what others are tweeting.
• Stay active. Post tweets every day.
• Reply to tweets you like.
• Post cool sites or interesting news and stuff.
• Don't post all the time about your business; that's spamming! So is constantly sending "new post, new post, have you seen this new post...."
• Tell peeps what interests you.

Have a look at the extremely helpful videos that explains Twitter in Plain English.



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