What is Twitter and How Does It Work?
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Here it is, the first in my training series for Twitter. This post will be covering the basics of what Twitter is and how it works, so if you’re already up and running with Twitter, bear with me while I get everybody else up to speed. We’ve got 10 more parts to go, and trust me, we’ll be getting into some more complicated things. But in order to get set up right, you’ve got to start at the beginning. And who knows, even if you’ve been using Twitter for a while, you still might learn something!
What Is Twitter?
Twitter is an extremely fast growing social media network with currently over 1 million members but this is expected to explode! All communications are limited to 140 characters, with no special coding or labeling, although you can use links (but the links are changed into smaller redirect links if they are too long).
Twitter describes themselves as a service for friends, family and coworkers to stay connected through the exchange of quick frequent answers to the same question – what are you doing?
In countries all around the world, people follow the sources most relevant to them and access information via Twitter as it happens—from breaking world news to updates from friends.
How Twitter Works
Twitter offers a simple way for people to connect. Twitter asks one question… “What are you doing?”
Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.
Twitter’s core technology is a device agnostic message routing system with rudimentary social networking features. They accept messages from SMS, web, mobile web, instant message, or from third party API projects.
Twitter’s engineering team works with an open-source web application framework called Ruby on Rails. The web site and user interface were designed using Omnigraffle and Photoshop. They like to make frequent changes to the interface, and Rails provides them with a skeleton code frameworks so they don’t have to re-do the whole site every time they add or change something like a sign in form or a picture upload feature. I realize that 90% of you do not care about this but now you know 
Twitter has a very simple interface for interacting with other users – simply type your message in to a text box, and click to send it out. It then goes into Twitter’s database, is sent out to all that area following you, will appear on your own homepage, your profile and on any cross-platform third party application you might be using (I will get into much more details on this later).
The other place that it appears is on the public timeline, which has all the tweets that everybody is posting. This moves really fast – most of the posts that you will see have been posted in the last 5 seconds.
Although Twitter asks you what you’re doing, most users use it for something other than that. You can share interesting links (yours or otherwise) with other people. You can set it up for Twitter to send out an update every time you add a new post to your blog PLUS more.
How Twitter Can Work For Your Business
Twitter can put your business’s message in front of thousands of people, instantly. If you can harness this power, and use it effectively, Twitter can help you promote your brand and add depth to your online identity.
Whether or not you’re experienced in social marketing, Twitter gives you a simple, easy-to-use way of interacting with your audience. Even if you’ve already done some social marketing and been successful, Twitter can still help you expand your audience and grow your circle of influence.
One thing to always keep in mind when using Twitter, however is this: this is a social tool, not an advertising outlet. You can’t just put messages out there that are just hard sells and expect people to keep following you. You need to put some time and effort into growing your community, interact with your followers (not selling things) and follow other people, and establish your credibility within Twitter before you start promoting yourself.
If you do it right, you can use your Twitter messages to direct your followers to check out your products, blogs, affiliate programs, or anything else that you want to promote. You can use Twitter to both promote things to your current contacts, as well as attract new business.
The best thing about twitter (in my opinion anyway) is they are much more open to developers creating third party applications (FaceBook recently changed to be more like Twitter)… the great thing about this is there are loads of tools that take 90% of the repetitive daily work out of using Twitter. This does not mean you can set and forget… that does not work with social sites… but you can do a lot of things automatically that are highly effective but time intensive.
A few of my absolute favorite 3rd Party Twitter Tools (I will be talking about these over the next couple weeks) are…
- http://untweeps.com/: Unfollow followers who have abandoned their twitter account
- http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/: Mass unfollow those who do not follow you
- http://www.twellow.com/: Best twitter directory
- http://twitterfeed.com/: Free service for auto posting to your twitter account
- http://www.tweetlater.com/: Great service for managing automated direct messages, auto following and more
- http://budurl.com/ Paid URL shortener that has excellent tracking
- http://easytweets.com/ Paid service that replaces twitterfeed, automatically finds loads of people to follow and integrates with Google Analytics
Over the next couple weeks, I will be getting into much more depth of actually setting up and marketing using Twitter but the purpose of this post was to set the ground work of understanding, so you can start off on the right foot.
If you like this post… like the idea of this series… or just like me, PLEASE comment below, Click Here to retweet this messge and share it with others
answers to the same question – what are you doing? In countries all around the world, people follow the sources most relevant to them and access information via Twitter as it happens—from breaking world news to updates from friends.Read More:
As I read this, one thing stuck in my mind the whole time: ‘This is probably the best post for someone who is new to Twitter, and potentially social media on a whole’.
If anybody ever asks me what Twitter is, I’ll probably direct them to this post!
Keep it up.
Well that is a nice compliment… MUCH APPRECIATED
I’ve put off getting in on Twitter but I know I really need to get with it! I’m looking forward to following this series to learn the ins and outs.
Thanks for the timely info!
Diana
I have only just got into twitter and I’m already starting to see amazing benefits. I agree, this post is fantastic overview of the concept of Twitter.
Great post for those still trying to figure out what Twitter is all about. I have just over 200 followers and am following a few more than that and I am just lost in all the tweets. So I am particularly interested in your recommendations of 3rd Party Twitter tools and what they can be used for.
Greg
The thing is that Twitter can also give you a headache if you are following a lot of people. I’ve found TweeetDeck and essential tool in blogging out the useless tweets so that you only concentrate on the ones you are interested in.
Twitter really is a good tools to run your business but if all people use twitter to run business that twitter will be lost
I do not agree with you on that.
#1. I use it for business but still read my twitter messages others send me and have actually even purchased two things because of that. http://www.budurl.com and http://www.easytweets.com
#2. Twitter is growing at a staggering growth and is expected to reach 50 million by the summer. Click Here to see a graph that represents growth due to Ashton and Oprah. These are not online business people, just targeted prospects. You use email for your business and it still works.
I just saw a post in a forum from an Internet Marketer who didn’t know what Twitter was, I should have directed him here.
Twitter is really becoming big time success as far as social media marketing is concerned. These days if one can plan smartly it is not very difficult task to drive traffic on any website using social media marketing. 3rd Party Twitter tools are always recommended in order to increase Twitter followers.
I started using Twitter as a challenge to see how many ‘followers’ I could get, compared with traditional list building methods.
What a pleasant surprise this has turned out to be and what fun too!
Interesting blog, and comments are called Moos lol
Hi, nice post. I have been wondering about this issue,so thanks for sharing. I will definitely be coming back to your posts.
great idea!! I am sure everybody can get the one or the other thing out of this post!! I, for sure, am going to follow it
!
Hi, interesting post. I have been thinking about this issue,so thanks for posting. I’ll definitely be subscribing to your site.
Hi John, thanks for the great tips with your great effort! I was kind of blur with twitter initially, i am just confused where a lot of blogs or websites having the widget “follow me on twitter”. Now, i am cleared!
Really good article! thanks for the post!!!
Nice article. Thanks for the 3rd Party tools list. I already use Twitter Feed. Will try out the others later.
Twitterfeed is just what I’m looking for.
Thanks for the sharing.
I’ve just installed a great plugin that informs you when members you have subscribed to publish a post via twitter, and you don’t even have to be following them. Now that is cool.
Still cannot send messages.
Newbie here, thanks for the info…easy to understand!
I'm thinking of opening an e-store, getting my ducks in a row. Not quite sure how best to market, so beginning to research, starting here seems to be a good idea.
I'll hang around for a while and learn.
Thank you for the info!
Lisa