What Is Twitter And How Does It Work?

Before knowing what is twitter and how does it work, let us know why it is essential to know about Twitter. Over the course of last year, the popularity of Twitter has sky rocketed. In March 2009 Nielsen blog reported that Twitter had an incredible monthly growth of 1,382%. As recently as August 2009, there were a reported 50 million users of Twitter.

An internal leaked document published by Techcrunch reported that Twitter is planning to add a billion users by 2013. To put that into perspective, a billion people today is one sixth the world’s population. So you need to pay attention when I stress that, for the affiliate marketer, Twitter is absolutely an essential tool.

What Is Twitter?

Let us now go in deep about what is twitter and how does it work. Twitter is a means to send short updates (“tweets”) to people who want to receive them (your “followers”). The simplest way to do that is to log into your Twitter account on the Web and type your tweet into the text field.

Any person who views your profile on Twitter can see all your outgoing tweets as they are publicly viewable. Followers can also see a list of tweets from everyone they follow when they log into their Twitter home pages.

How Does Twitter Work?

These updates cannot be longer than 140 characters. Whilst this may seem restrictive, especially if you’re used to 400-500 word blog posts, it is the key to Twitter’s success. Limiting the number of words you can tweet makes Twitter very easy and quick to use. It’s what is commonly known as the art of “Micro Blogging”.

There are many ways to use this tweet “restriction” to your advantage. For those who enjoy using social networking applications on this mobile phone, you can send and receive tweets equally well as on your computer.

Essentially, the point of a tweet is to make it interesting. People can follow you if they find your tweets interesting and vice versa. When you tweet, your message appears in your followers’ Twitter account. You can simply send messages or you can insert links in your tweets. Links to your twitter post... hm.. I'll tell you more about that later in my posts.

It’s the real-time value of tweeting and Twitter that makes it such a unique social networking tool. The ability to write quick and easy to read messages, viewable in public is what differentiates Twitter.

Hope you learned a bit about what Twitter is and why it is for. But there are some more things you should know and I'll let you know about them in my future posts. If you don't have a Twitter account yet, just create one now. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter.

Follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/picktip

As I say you everyday, keep in touch.