Twitter: Expert Guides and Resources

Ever thought about using Twitter to get some eBay business? Twitter has 500 million total users (more than 215 million active users) and serves up over 500 million tweets a day. What’s a tweet? Not just a sound effect from a parakeet anymore. Now it’s a short online comment from one Twitter user to another; tweets often flit back and forth between users who follow each other.

Not every Twitter account is written. Quite a few really useful Twitter accounts are automated bots (short for robots) that publish Tweets that have never touched human hands. At first, this sounds kind of awful, but there are some great reasons for doing this. Want to be among the very first to know when there is earthquake activity near San Francisco, California?

With many web services, signing up is the easiest part of an otherwise-complicated process. With Twitter, using the site is just as easy as signing up. To sign up for a Twitter account, follow these steps:Use your web browser to navigate to the Twitter website.Twitter website.">The Twitter splash screen appears.

Direct messages (DMs) let you send your contacts private notes through Twitter. Just like regular tweets and @replies, direct messages are limited to 140 characters. Unlike regular tweets and @replies, the only person who can see a direct message is the recipient. You can send a DM only to a Twitter user who's following you (but you don't have to be following that user), which helps cut down on spamming and other unwanted messages.

Many twitterers use Twitter almost exclusively on their mobile phones. Text messaging (SMS) is the most basic way to access Twitter via your cellphone. In addition to sending tweets as SMS messages from your phone, you can receive your contacts’ tweets on your phone via SMS.Open your own Home screen and, under Device Updates on the right sidebar, click phone to activate your phone notifications.

Using Twitter is fun and surprisingly easy. It doesn’t matter where you access Twitter, — on Twitter.com, or on a desktop or mobile app on your smartphone. You can quickly navigate the Twitterverse with just a few commands. Even Twitter etiquette is straightforward and simple. Before you know it, you’ll be sending Tweets and following on Twitter like an expert.

Hashtags have become part of the core culture of Twitter for many avid users. Basically, hashtags are a way to delineate a keyword that people can use to organize discussions about specific topics and events. Originally, the website Hashtags automatically tracked and displayed these hashtags. But Twitter occasionally turns off the portion of its API that the Hashtags site uses, so you can’t always search it reliably.

Twitter is a very receptive environment for forging connections with new friends and contacts, so amassing a list of followers is relatively simple. Typically, you gain followers in the natural course of using Twitter, but here are a few guidelines to follow: Be real. Being genuine goes a long way, and you’re likely to gain followers without even trying.

One way many people use Twitter is to spread news or breaking stories. If you hope to be part of this movement, you can use these tools to prepare for your Twitter-inspired citizen-journalist moment: A mobile phone that has a camera and/or video camera: Most cellphones have at least the former these days. And make sure that you have a cellular data plan so you can send your photos.