What is Twitter?
I’m sure many of you are asking this question.
Twitter has two main parts:
1. You can post status updates like on your Facebook Wall (many people do this from their smartphones throughout the day). They are usually short, 160 characters or less.
2. Other people can ‘Follow’ or subscribe to your updates (which many people also read from their smartphones throughout the day). When you post an update, they are automatically notified. You can require your approval for others to follow your updates, or allow anyone to follow them.
One of the interesting features of Twitter and ‘Tweeting’ involves something called hashtags.
A hashtag is a ‘pound sign’ # followed by a word or words without spaces. This can be a person’s name, a place, an event… almost anything.
The purpose of a hashtag is to put a Twitter post into a Category.
For example, perhaps someone is posting Tweets and inserting the hashtag #cookiemonster.
You could search for Tweets that all have the hashtag #cookiemonster and find out all the good news being posted currently about Cookie Monster.
Another interesting feature of Tweeting uses the ‘at’ symbol @
When you insert another Twitter user’s username with an @ symbol in front of it, this automatically notifies the user that he or she was mentioned in someone else’s Tweet. These are called @mentions. Note that if you are @mentioning someone who is very popular, they may miss your @mention due to the sheer volume of notifications they get daily, hourly or ‘minutely.’
You can post and reply to Tweets on all of today’s smartphones using a Twitter app. This is a program that you can download and install on your phone. You log into the app with your username and password just like an email app or Facebook app. You can post status updates and receive notifications (ringtones, for example) when someone that you are following Tweets, or if you are mentioned in someone else’s Tweet.
Here are some people you can follow on Twitter: CBSNews, MarthaStewart, BarackObama, Nerdist, ConanOBrien, PennJillette, TheRealStanLee.
For more information,
How Stuff Works has an excellent article on Twitter,
click here to read more.
P.S. I recently discovered a blog post StephanieMarieH on WordPress.
She delves into the details of recently joining the Twitter armada.
Her article is called Hashtags, and Tweets, and Mentions…Oh My!