Twitter has been one of the slowest forms of social media to catch on, but it is becoming quite popular. Tweets, as posts on this platform are called, can only be 140 characters long. That’s not a lot of words, so you have to be brief. In the beginning, it looked like teens were the big prospective users since they spend so much time sending text messages, but more and more people have found Twitter useful.

It may come as a surprise when you arrive at the twitter.com website that you aren’t given any information about the platform. You are invited to sign up for an account and if you have an account already, you can log in there, but if you want to know why you should sign up, or get enough information to tell you whether it is the right thing for you, then you will have to look elsewhere.

Unless you have already decided to join, you are probably going to feel like you have come to the wrong place. Fortunately, there is a lot of info about Twitter that can be found elsewhere online. A Google search on the term “Twitter” yields 11.2 billion pages. http://search.twitter.com is a simple search engine that will look for your chosen term in Twitter posts. On this page, there is also a list of “trending topics” or items that are getting a lot of tweets.

Setting up your Twitter account is easy. You start with a profile where you make a list of your interests so people who have similar interests can find you. Then you will want to find people to connect with, which Twitter calls “following”. Only the people that you follow will get your tweets and people who follow you can send tweets to your account. You can’t find people by putting their real names in the search box, so if you want to follow them, you will need to know what their Twitter handle is.

This has given you a look at the steps to getting started. Once you are past the basics, there is a lot that you can do with Twitter. The format is unlike any others that you are likely to be familiar with but don’t be put off by that. After you get the hang of communicating in short bursts it can be a lot of fun.