Twitter 101

If you don’t know anything about Twitter, you know it’s the noisiest social media platform out there. I don’t mean physically noisy, that doesn’t make much sense. I mean it in the sense that Twitter is a blizzard of information. It’s the fastest-paced and most used platform to share news. It’s easy to tune in to things you care about and tune out to those you don’t. Also, it’s free to start an account, so why not?

Setting up a Twitter account is very simple. You can add whatever profile picture and banner you please. Profile pictures are often time referred to as your “avi,” which is short for avatar. Profile pictures are often time referred to as your “avi,” which is short for avatar. You can also add a bio, which can be any description that you want on your profile. Technically, your bio can be as random or as logical as you want; it’s not primarily used as a professional application, therefore there aren’t many do’s or don’ts. Moving on, you can add a location of where you’re from, your birthday or link a website to your Twitter account. I personally have my VSCO account linked to my Twitter. If you don’t know what a VSCO is, maybe I’ll write a blog about it sometime to shed some light on the application.

Your twitter account will be broken into four sections: tweets, replies, media and likes. Your tweets are any posts you compose, while your replies are any tweets you compose that are in response to someone else’s tweet. If you retweet or quote someone’s tweet, which is reposting it, those will show up under the “tweets” section. The “media” section consists of any graphics you post with your tweets. The “likes” section is self-explanatory because it consists of all tweets of others that you’ve liked. You can also pin a tweet you've made that you like to appear at the top of your profile. These tweets can easily be changed, removed or added.

Twitter is unique in the way that anyone can get on and create an account in minutes. You don’t even need a profile to view public accounts, you can simply google someone’s twitter account and scroll through their tweets; you can’t do that on sites such as LinkedIn. Twitter recently updated the application to allow users to create tweet with 280 characters rather than the limited 140 characters. This allows more space for people to share stories, opinions, news, market items or events, etc.

Twitter is also an effective marketing channel for business because it is easy to reach a wide audience with mentions and hashtags. Mentioning someone in a tweet is essentially tagging someone in a tweet and is indicated with the @ symbol. This is similar to tagging someone in Facebook post. Just like tagging someone on Facebook, mentioning someone in a tweet allows the post to receive more attention. Hashtags are another great way to receive attention because if someone searches a hashtag, every tweet with that hashtag will appear in chronological order. The more hashtags used, the more attention a tweet gets. Hashtags are indicated by the # symbol.

Twitter can seem overwhelming at first, but the longer you use the platform, the more sense it makes. It’s my favorite social media application to scroll through when I’m bored because there is always something new to read or look at on it. I remember when I first got the app, I stopped using it for a while because I was so overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do. Now that I’ve been on it for several years, I think it’s the easiest and most useful application I have on my phone.