Twitter is a free social networking site which allows users to send and read tweets (messages, quotes or even ads). Tweets can be up to 140 characters long, they are displayed on the authors profile page, and also sent out to the author’s followers. Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey in 2006 and since then has been a huge success worldwide, increasing more and more in popularity.

Twitter can be accessed via the Twitter website, through external applications and tweets can also be sent via SMS. The character limit was originally put into place to allow compatibility with SMS messaging. Because of this limit, the usage of URL shortening services has increased to enable users to fit more text while still leaving room for their URL. These applications; tinyurl, bit.ly, and tr.im come in very handy for this purpose. There are also content hosting services such as Twitpic and NotePub, specifically for Twitter users which will allow for multimedia and text no longer than 140 characters.

The aim for users is to deliver relevant information and fresh content to their followers on a regular basis.

When you look at Twitter as an advertising tool, you might think of it as a radio station, if you have built your followers up to a substantial amount you will have a valuable audience for your tweets. Twitter has a following limit which allows you to only follow a certain amount of people per day so don’t go crazy, I would follow 300 new people a day, and most people have an auto follow back function so these people will mostly follow you in return. Once you have reached 2,000 follows Twitter has a 10% ratio limit meaning your followers and follows must be within 10% of each other which is why you need to unfollow people who don’t follow you back.

Tweepi.com has an unfollow function which will see who is not following you in return and allow you to unfollow them in a few easy steps. Socialoomph.com is a social site helper, this site will enable you to schedule tweets throughout the day, using this function you can spend 20 minutes in the morning organizing your tweets to ensure your Twitter profile is posting regularly. Another handy tool in socialoomph is the auto follow function.

Keeping these basic tips in mind you can easily build your Twitter account into an audience of many thousand, reading your posts, quotes, content and ads in just a few weeks. Remember Twitter is a social site so, be social, that is half the fun after all!

Wishing you Success