Twitter For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1

Getting Started with Twitter

In This Chapter

Understanding what Twitter’s all about

Seeing how individuals, organizations, and businesses use Twitter

Discovering what you can do with Twitter

Getting into the microblogging mindset

You may have heard of Twitter but have no idea what it actually is. Twitter is basically a powerful social network that allows you to keep up with the people, businesses, and organizations you’re interested in — whether you know them personally or not. It also lets you share what you’re doing with the world — everyone from your family and friends to complete strangers. (You’ll have to bear with us to find out why you would want to do that.) MIT Professor Andrew McAfee (@amcafee) describes Twitter this way: “With Twitter, my friends are never far away.”

McAfee was most certainly right, because Twitter’s company data in July 2014 showed that 115 million active monthly users were sending more than 53 million Tweets daily. That’s a whole lot of tweeting! Additionally, of those 53 million Tweets, almost 40 percent were sent from mobile devices such ...