Some people that use Twitter will use it to keep friends and family up to date about their lives. They will tweet things about how their day is going and what new things their baby did.

To friends and family, these things may be exciting and entertaining, but to other people, this is boring with a capital “B”. These people will only have a few followers who actually care to watch out for their tweets.

Most people use Twitter as a tool to find out what is going on. The follow other people to find out about things that interest them. It doesn’t mean that they want to know that you just had a Tick Tak and you enjoyed it. This kind of thing will kill off your follower base faster than an outbreak of swine flu.

When someone follows you they may be serial following people, in which case, they don’t really care what you have to say. They will un-follow you a few days later if you don’t follow them back anyway, so you really don’t have to or need to worry about them.

On the other hand, there will be people who follow you because they are interested in what you might have to say. These are the people you have to worry about. You have to tweet to this part of your following masses as if your life depended on it. Give then something to look forward to every time they look at their Twitter timeline.

If you do this, you will be creating a loyal following, and these loyal followers will keep following you, and they will watch you and look for what you have to say.

They will do this because you will be giving them what they want.

A great example is @pigspotter. This account has been open for about a year, and he provides info about police and traffic police road blocks in and around Johannesburg in South Africa.

Road blocks are a problem in South Africa with a large percentage of the police forces members apparently looking for bribes. @pigspotter provides this info to his followers and people check his timeline to see if there are any road blocks that they need to stay away from, because they cause huge delays in driving anywhere that they are located.

He also tweets about other problems like stolen cars, road accidents and missing people, so his followers have a reason to follow him and they stay with him. He has close to 100,000 followers and his follower count is growing all the time.

If you are using Twitter to keep your customers or potential customers up to date with your latest and greatest products, then telling those that follow you about your day and what you had for lunch, will cause them to un-follow you because this isn’t what they are looking for.

Think about this for a bit…

What do your followers want to know about?

What do your followers expect to see when they read your tweets?

Why are your followers following you?

What can you provide for your followers that they can’t get from following someone else?

The answers to these questions will give you a guide as to what you should tweet about.

Now… Go and tweet something

Twitter is a free to use service that anyone can use and if you stay within the limits imposed by the Twitter administration, you shouldn’t have any problems.

The average Twitter user will not have any problems tweeting, following and being followed.

There are a large number of Twitter users that are out to make money using this free service, and the administrators don’t seem to mind much, unless they take advantage of the system and spam their followers.

When Twitter first started up, there were no restrictions to its usage, and the marketers, spammers and generally nasty users took full advantage of this and went wild. They followed many many hundreds and thousands more people than they had following them. They spam tweeted as they pleased and generally caused a whole lot of trouble for the system administrators.

While this might have been great for them, it was a complete mess for the other users of Twitter and the administrators themselves.

With this in mind, the Twitter administrators decided to impose some limits to keep things under control.

Every now and again you will see the “Fail Whale” Twitter page. This is a page that will tell you that the Twitter servers are too busy to handle the amount of traffic on the system, and they cannot keep up. Due to the popularity of Twitter, this is something that would be many times worse than it is at the present, if these limits weren’t imposed.

What are the limits?

To start off there are limits to the number or people you can follow…

1.     Daily limits

Twitter users may not follow more that 1000 people in a day. This limit is universal, and no one is exempt no matter what.

 2.     Total number of people you may follow.

If you are new to Twitter, you will start off following no one. As you start following people, you won’t have any other limits other than the daily limits to the number of people you may follow. Once you follow 2000 people, you will find that you cannot follow any more people. This is because you may not follow too many more people that you have following you. The limit is not published but is thought to be about 10%.

There are two things you can do at this point that will allow you to follow more people.

You can un-follow some people, or you can wait for more people to follow you, until your following to followers difference is less than 10%.

Tweeting Limits

You may not tweet the exact same tweet too often. Sometimes you may re-tweet the same thing, and you will see a message in this respect.

The rule is that you cannot tweet the same text more than once in a short time. If you get this message, you should tweet something else, or re-word the tweet, so that Twitter doesn’t see it as the same thing.

There is also a limit to the number of tweets you can post in a 24 hour period and that is currently set to 1000. That shouldn’t worry most users. Even spammers may be ok with this one.

Un-Written rules

While the following aren’t rules or limits set out by the Twitter administrators, they are guidelines that will make your Twitter experience more rewarding…

Don’t spam your followers. Your followers will un-follow you in droves if you spam them. Just don’t do it!

Don’t Tweet about everything. This goes with not spamming your followers. They just don’t care if you just had breakfast or brushed your teeth. Keep your tweets interesting and to the point, and your followers will not only stay and follow you, but they will also re-tweet your tweets to their followers.

If you found this useful, leave a comment or share with your friends.

Happy Twittering

At first glance most people wouldn’t be incorrect in thinking that Twitter was something that was doomed to fail from the start, but it has grown to be one of the most used online services in the world.

Twitter is a social networking platform that allows users to literally follow and share in the lives of friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers. It is a platform that gives ordinary people, like you and I, access to the lives of the super rich and super famous.

How?

Basically, Twitter allows you to set up an account. This account allows you to follow, by clicking the “follow” button of another Twitter user. It also allows other Twitter users to follow you in exactly the same way.

Twitter users “tweet” anything they want to tweet about. These tweets are seen by those that follow them as they are tweeted.

A tweet is a short message or “Microblog” of up to 140 characters in length. Most people would think that not being able to type an essay as a tweet would be a negative, but it forces people to be precise, and people love Twitter, so who am I to complain?

Getting started is easy…

To open an account on Twitter, all you have to do is go to www.twitter.com, and fill in your name, e-mail address, desired password and click “Sign up for Twitter”. From there you will be taken to a page that will confirm your details. The page will confirm that your account details are unique, and ask you for a username. Click “Create my Account”, and your account will be created. You will then be a Twitter user, and once you have confirmed your e-mail address by clicking the link in the e-mail that Twitter sent you, you will have full access to Twitter.

Sending a Tweet…

When you send a tweet, you are answering the question, “What’s Happening?”.

You will see a text box that you can use to type your tweet in. As you type, you will see a counter going down that shows you how many characters you have left to use in your tweet.

Type your tweet into the text box, and when you are done, you can click “Tweet”. This will send your tweet to anyone who is following you.

If you want to send a tweet to a person, you should start the tweet with @username, with “username” being the twitter user name of the person you want the tweet to go to. This will send the tweet to the person mentioned, but it will not be private. All of your followers will be able to see the tweet, so don’t tweet private messages in this way.

Sending a private/direct message(DM)…

A Direct Message is a message that is sent directly to another Twitter user. They are private like e-mails are private.

Note: You can only send a direct message to someone who is following you.

How to Follow someone…

Now that you have your Twitter account, you need to follow people. There are various methods to find people to follow, and I will go into that in the next step.

For now, you can follow me by going to www.twitter.com/lotsoffollower.

Click  to follow the person who’s profile you are looking at.

That’s all there is to it.

How to find people to follow…

Finding people to follow is also easy. There is the method mentioned in the previous step. This requires you to know their @name. This @name is their Twitter account name.

You can also search for people to follow using the built in Twitter search tool.

On the top of the Twitter page, you will see…

This is the Twitter search tool. Type in a person’s name and press enter or click the small magnifying glass icon to the right of the search text box.

There are two sets of search results that will be returned to you. You will see any mentions of the words you searched for in tweets on the left of the screen, and people search results on the right of the screen.

You can follow people by clicking the “follow” link that is tagged on to the end of the person’s name in the search results pane on the right of your screen.