Making Your First Tweet At Twitter.com

Have you set up a Twitter account but haven’t started using it yet?

Here’s a quick walk through and a basic introduction on how to use twitter for the first time, I’ve also included a couple of tips to help you make the most out of your twitter messages.

The reason I wanted to put this post together was to show some friends of mine how simple twitter really is to use, mainly because I know they have an account with twitter but don’t use it.

OK, for starters lets assume you have a favorite website and you just have to share it with someone, anyone for that matter.

All you do is copy the URL from the address bar of your Browser.

Log in to your twitter account and on the home page, paste into the “What are you doing?” text box, your URL, along with some descriptive text about the link you want to share, then Click on the update button.

Congratulations you have just used Twitter, it’s really that easy.

and… If you decide you want to delete your tweets at any stage, all you do is hover your mouse cursor over your published tweet, you will see a couple of small icons show up, by Clicking on the icon that looks like a Trash Can, you will delete your post.

So what do you do if the URL you want to share takes up all of your text space? seeing how you only have 140 characters to work with.

For example; lets assume I want to tweet about the latest post on my blog, but as you can see from the image below when you copy the entire URL and paste it into the Twitter text area, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of room to write any text.

The solution, Make my URL shorter.

To Do that I need the services of a link shortening site.

One that I suggest you try is a site called “www.bit.ly”

The reason I suggest you try bit.ly is…

because it’s free and…
you can track your click through rates, you can tell exactly how many people Click on the link you have sent out through Twitter.

Using a tracking service gives you some idea on how effective and responsive your twitter list is.

So after I have taken my long URL and shortened it using the bit.ly shortening service, I Copy and paste the link into the text area on the Twitter home page.

As you can see from the image below, I now have plenty of room for my description text with plenty of room to spare, and I still have 65 characters left, so if anyone wants to re-tweet my tweet they can do so without deleting any of my text.

So hopefully this should give you a couple of pointers to get you started with Twitter, and if your still wondering what to tweet about, why don’t you Tweet this page just for some practice