What is Twitter

What can I use Twitter for?

Twitter is one of the social media platforms and it is quite similar to Facebook in its core. It uses a system of short messages that contain maximum 280 characters (until 7th November 2017 only 140 characters were allowed), but you can add multimedia files and links.

Unlike on Facebook, here you don't follow your friends or colleagues from work, you follow people or organisations that you find interesting and that are writing about something that you want to read about. You can use it to read the news that is coming much faster than in traditional media and to discuss a curious topic with thousands of people, including specialists.

You can also use it to promote your company by posting news about it, about your products, events, etc. and insert a link to further description for people interested in it. You already have an advantage, as only people interested in your product are following your account or hashtag. It allows you to react faster to opinions of your clients, answer their questions and help them with problems.

On the other hand, if you want to get with your adverts to a younger generation, Twitter might not be the right choice. Research shows that this platform is used mostly by people at the age of 25 and older.

How can I personalize my account?

There are some customization options. You can add profile and header photos that will be shown on your profile, change theme colour and add your personal information like biography, location or date of birth.

How to connect with other users?

Twitter, unlike Facebook, doesn't use a friend list to link you with others. Instead of that, you follow accounts or topics that you find interesting. You have a few options that allow finding them i.e. search bar, suggested trends that you might be interested in and proposed people that might want to follow. You can send tweets that can be read by all community and use hashtags to mark the topics. You can also comment, like and retweet information that you find interesting.

What kind of useful tools does Twitter offer?

Twitter offers a number of tools to help you better use its potential.

Adding people you follow to specific lists helps you manage different topics into a coherent whole. Hashtag (#), which is something like a keyword in your message, lets you to add your tweet to a specific topic so others can easily find it.

You can decide who will see the message you are writing. For example, if you write @ before someone's login, only people who are following both you and person you are writing to will be able to see this message. If you don't want anyone else to see your message, there is a direct message system, but you are allowed to send a message to a person only if this person follows you.

There are also options to retweet someone else wrote so your followers can see it and reply to a tweet. A tweet can be also pinned, which means that it will appear on the top of your timeline.

You can mute words and hashtags so you won't see the news you don't want to. Twitter lets you also block a person. In this case you won't see what he is writing about and he won't see your tweets.

The etiquette.

Etiquette is quite similar to the Facebook one, so you should avoid inappropriate and offensive language or your account can be banned.

Mind what you are posting, since "what was once published on the Internet, stays there forever".

Don't tweet too often. Unless you are a news reporter, you shouldn't write hundreds of tweets a day. It might be considered as spam and you will lose followers. Instead, try to tweet only interesting information.

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