Posting On Twitter

If you’re not on Twitter, it is quite easy to open an account. Simply go to www.twitter.com and click on where it says “Get Started – Join Now!” You will be taken to a page that asks you for your full name, your username (you can use your email address or create a username for yourself) a password, and your email address. Once you have submitted this you will shortly receive an email confirmation and you are ready to log on and “join the conversation” via your username and password.

Once you are on Twitter, there are a number of different ways of posting available.

First, there’s a regular post. When you type in a message to Twitter and hit “update” it will be viewable by all the people who are “following” you (”followers” are other users who have subscribed at no charge to them to your profile page, enabling them to view all your posts whenever they log on).

Users can use a maximum of 140 characters per post or “tweet” as they are called. You can tweet as little or as often as you want, as long as each individual tweet does not exceed 140 characters.

Another type of post is a reply. When you type in a regular message, people may then reply to your post. You’ll see your user name with the symbol @ before it when someone replies to your message. You can respond to other people this way too. Just type @ and then their user name directly after that. These replies can be viewed by everyone who is following you and/or the other person you are replying to.

Lastly, there is the direct message. If you want to send a private message to someone that no one else can see, you can send a direct message. To do so, simply type the letters “dm” with the person’s user name. You’ll receive messages from others on a special page of Twitter and be notified via e-mail when someone direct messages you.

Twitter has been compared by some to being in a kind of virtual sidewalk cafe and “hearing” (or actually reading in this case) random snatches of conversation much the same as one would in that type of setting. Lots of Twitter postings read “just woke up”, “about to go for lunch now”, and so on. However, there is also a lot more, some of it of actual substance. Many celebrities are on Twitter (Jimmy Fallon for one seems to be a frequent “tweeter”) and some have recently engaged in good-natured (I assume…) mock competitions as to who can garner the most followers. News organizations and individual news reporters (both print and television) also post here.

The regular post is formatted as an answer to the question “what are you doing?” (hence the aforementioned posts about having lunch and so forth).However, one need not take this literally. If “what are you doing?” seems too limiting or just plain boring, maybe try thinking of it in terms of “what interests you” or “what has you attention.”

Some ideas for Twitter posts can include sharing of information (i.e. links to things on the Web that you think are interesting). You can also ask questions of your own such as what other people think of a hot news story or their opinion of a specific topic. 140 characters are also a potentially useful space to share a short, helpful tip about some item of interest such as job searching, medical remedies and so on.