What is Twitter?

If you haven’t heard about Twitter you must have been living, well, in a third world prison!

Everyone and their dog now appears to be using Twitter! It’s currently the 15th most visited site on the internet according to Alexa Top 500 Global Sites list and growing rapidly.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows you to tweet your message to your followers and the world. If you are a Facebook user it might be easier to understand Twitter if you liken the service to Facebook status updates. A tweet is simply a message of up to 140 characters, just a sentence or two to convey your message.

Twitter allows anyone to broadcast to the world, and more specifically their followers, updates on their business, website or life. Take a look at the following video for a basic, plain english description:

Once you have an understanding of how easy Twitter is to use you can begin to see the power of the microblogging platform.

One of the keys to harnessing Twitters power is interaction. Follow users who follow you (if you find their tweets interesting), answer peoples questions and re-tweet interesting messages. Growing your follower-base is essentially growing your customer base and to make Twitter an effective business tool you need to build the trust of your followers.