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Twitter is a free social networking service that allows
you to micro-blog by sending short “updates” of 140
characters or less to others via a text message from
your mobile phone, by typing a message from the
Twitter site or using instant messaging from Jabber
or Google Talk. Twitter is the most widely used microblogging
network in the world. Micro-blogging is a
very powerful and increasingly popular way to
communicate with friends and clients, build buzz,
and generate prospective business leads. Many
celebrities, as well as popular bloggers and writers,
use Twitter to network with friends in real time.
Avery powerful and increasingly popular way to
communicate with friends and clients, build buzz,
and generate prospective business leads is
through micro-blogging. Micro-blogging is a form of
blogging that allows you to write brief text updates,
usually less than 200 characters, and publish them, either
to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group you
choose. Micro-blogging is a form of social networking that
enables you to keep your followers up-to-date with what
you are doing at any given time of the day.
The most widely used micro-blogging network is Twitter.
Twitter, located at www.twitter.com, is a free social
networking service that allows you to micro-blog by
sending short “updates” of 140 characters or less to
others via a text message from your mobile phone, by
typing a message from the Twitter site, or by using
instant messaging from Jabber or Google Talk.
Keep in mind that when you sign up for Twitter via the
Twitter Web site, your communication settings are
automatically set to public.
By keeping your
communication settings to public, your updates
automatically go to both your friends and to the public
timeline, which is automatically posted and updated for
public viewing every four minutes to the Twitter Web site.
If you intend to use Twitter to build buzz about your
business or generate traffic to your Web site, keep the
public settings.
One of the ways you can use Twitter to generate Web site
traffic and buzz is by sharing daily deals, special offers, or
exciting product news with your readers. If you have an
e-commerce Web site, you may want to send out a message
each morning announcing your top-selling products. For
example, “Yesterday we sold over 1,000 red widgets. We
have less than that left in inventory, so order now to
guarantee shipment.”
Twitter is a tool that allows you to quickly
communicate and share news with your friends and
within the Twitter community. For example, if you
manage a music Web site, you can use Twitter to
break news about concerts and entertainment
gossip. To promote yourself or your Web site, you
can simply include a tag at the end of each message
such as “Brought to you by X.com.”
You can send any of your friends a private message
using Twitter. To send a friend a text message, click
Message from the Twitter profile page or simply
click Direct Messages and choose the recipient from
the drop-down box. If you want to send a private
message from your phone, use the following
command: D + username + message. Note that a
person’s username and screen name may be
different. To ensure that your private message is
sent to the proper person, you can verify the
accuracy of the person’s username by going to her
profile page and looking at the URL at the top of
the page. The username follows the
www.twitter.com domain: for example,
www.twitter.com/kingpepper. |