We started off on this section by dissecting what  social media means. We will be looking at a couple of social media sites/technologies, how they work and how they can work for you.

Yesterday, Sunday 21st of March 2010 marked the 4th year that the first tweet was sent out. So we say; Happy birthday to Twitter, the revolutionary product that has disrupted a bunch!

So, what is twitter: “Twitter is a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now.”

It allows you to express your mind in just 140 characters 20 less than SMS character limit. With more than 50,000 third party applications, you dont need to go to twitter.com to make use of it.

How does it works?

Well, you wont get the real benefit of twitter until you “follow” people! Following simply means that you search for those who are already using twitter, then choose to listen to whatever they say. Their “tweet” streams appears on your home page after login. To send a tweet to someone you have to precede his username with “@” sign. e.g @webtrendsng

Twitter comes with a lot of lingo but you will learn more as you use it. Let me give you snip of the common ones;

• Tweet: A single message entered through the interface. “What’s happening?” these messages (tweets) are made public, so everything you say on twitter can be searched by anyone, even indexed by Google.
• DM: Direct Message, similar to sending someone an email or internal mail on social networks. remember that twitter messages are public but DM messages are not made public but can only be read by the person sent to.
• Follow: To add twitter user as friend. When you follow someone you become friend.
• Unfollow: To “unfriend” someone… to stop following someone’s updates.
• Retweet: To broadcast what someone says on twitter preceding with “RT”.
• Hashtag: hashtag is a way twitter uses to structure communication on its platform. Remember that everything said on twitter are public and comes one after the other. So if you want to view discussion on a topic you can search with the help of hashtag used to identify the topic. For example; the recent protest staged in Abuja by Nigerian youths was with hashtag #enoughisenough so anyone that send a tweet and no add the hashtag will have his message shown alongside others with same hashtag.
• Trending: When a topic gains traction it is referred to as trending. The high the number of people discussing about a topic the higher the chances of the topic to trend. When a topic trends, it is shown on twitter’s home page.

Twitter is good for personal, business and advocacy use. In recent tims it has proved to be a tool that can move the world!

We will talk more on stuffs you can do with twitter… letter, keep it locked down here.

Get an account at twitter.com