Twitter
is an online tool that lets you write brief text updates
(of up to 140 characters) and broadcast them. People can choose
to "follow" your updates (aka "tweets") and you can follow
others and receive their tweets.
However,
there is much more to Twitter than this as you will see.
Note: You
might wish to have more than one account for your different
personal, professional and/or organisational accounts.
1
- Sign up for a Twitter account
Go to
www.twitter.com and sign up. You will
need to choose a unique username (the shorter the better!). Your display name can be your
own name or a pseudonym. You will need to give an
email address, as you will need to validate your account.
During the sign-up process,
Twitter will suggest some people to follow. You can choose to
follow them (ie receive their updates if you want to).
Your Twitter home page will now be set up.
2 - Customise your
profile page
Your profile page will
also be set up (select Profile to see it).
It will have a unique
web address, e.g. www.twitter.com/username and will
show information about you, who you are following and who is
following you. It will also display your recent tweets.
To customise your profile
page, select Settings.
Here
you can write something about yourself. You can also upload a picture,
avatar or logo (select Picture from the Settings tab), as
well as customise the look of your
Twitter page, i.e. background design and colour scheme
(Select Design).
Note: there are further
ways to customise the design of your profile, see some of
the articles in the Reading list below
Note: you can protect your profile
to keep your tweets private, and approve those who can follow
you. (You do this in Account). However, this means
that none of your tweets will be visible at any time to anyone
except your followers, and this does have repercussions for
doing other things on Twitter . Also, note that many people do not
choose to follow back those who have protected their tweets,
since they can't see what they have previously tweeted about.
3 - Accessing and using
your account
Once you have set up your
account, you can either do so by logging into Twitter in your
web browser on your computer or on your mobile phone at
http://m.twitter.com
or by using another Twitter web, desktop
or phone client. You will find some suggestions of Twitter
clients here.
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