What is Twitter and why is it needed? Terms used in it. What is Twitter and why is it needed? What does the bubble mean on Twitter?

Today I want to talk about such a popular phenomenon as Twitter. For webmasters, this social network can help attract additional visitors to your site, as well as other social networks. For example, such as, and, as well as Twitter can serve as a kind of analogue.

For example, as far as I know, many visitors to my blog site follow its updates through this microblogging service. But in order for this to work as it should, you will need to understand what Twitter is, how to register with it and how to use it.

By the way, recently the registration form and interface of this service have been completely translated into Russian, which is good news. True, when this article was written, this social network was not yet friendly with the Russian language, so I had to rewrite and add something.

What is Twitter and how to use it?

So, what is Twitter? First of all, it is a service designed for communication. It has replaced (or in addition to) the tired traditional social networks, and its audience is growing like a snowball. Now, it is probably difficult to meet a person who has never heard of it or similar microblogging services (FriendFeed, etc.).

However, for many, the essence of these services remains unclear and therefore it is worth answering the question “What is Twitter” in a little more detail. In this series of articles, I will try to talk in detail about how to register in it (now in Russian), how to work with it, how to gain subscribers (followers), how to automatically post the titles of new materials on your site into it (this will be) .

Twitter was created in 2006, and by the beginning of 2007 it had already gained sufficient popularity. It is sometimes characterized as microblogging due to the fact that the size of the message left in it is limited to 140 characters. Due to this limitation, Twitter messages using special services look something like this: http://bit.ly/4J2b1R.

Due to the short length of messages, communication via it is very convenient from a mobile phone. Actually, Twitter was designed for this, because... it has a limit of 140 characters per message, and in a mobile phone, as you know, the limit is 160 characters (in SMS messages). The remaining 20 characters can be used for the sender's name.

But to do this, you will have to provide your login and password to access your Email. My main mailbox is located on Gmail, but somehow I didn’t dare to transfer its password to Twitter.

If you decide to take this step, then, apparently, based on your address book, all users from it who also have an account in this microblogging service will be found. Well, you can add them to your friends.

In the time since this article was written, Twitter has not only begun to support the Russian language, but has acquired a new interface. Therefore, immediately after successful registration, you will be taken to a page at the very top of which there will be icons for your next steps.

The step described in the previous paragraph is now called “Friends” and is numbered 3:

The new interface has a new step that opens after registration - “Interests”. On this tab you can tell us which topics are interesting to you. By opening one of the proposed topics, you will see the feeds available in it.

To subscribe to them you will only need to click on the button "Read" located nearby. As a result, the button will change its appearance and the inscription “Reading” will appear on it:

How to change the background for Twitter?

By default, your profile background will be blue, but you can change it, as well as the color of the panels, font color and links on your page at your discretion. For example, my Twitter looks like So.

You can also see what the interface of this service looked like before. To do this, you will need to select the “To old Twitter” option from the drop-down list next to your “Username” (located in the upper right corner):

To customize the design of your page, select the “Settings” item from the top menu (see screenshot above), and in the window that opens, select the “Design” item.

To customize the background of your Twitter page, you can use the options provided by simply clicking on them. If none of the proposed backgrounds are to your liking, then you can use your graphic file as a .

To do this, click on the “Change background image” button under the background thumbnails, click on the “Select file” button and find the desired graphic file on your computer.

By clicking on the “Change design colors” button in the Twitter settings on the right under the thumbnails, you will be able to:

1. fill the background with one color, which you can select by clicking on the square labeled “background”
2. set the text color on your account pages by clicking on the square labeled “text”
3. select a color for all links by clicking on the square labeled “links”
4. You can select the background color and border color for the right sidebar on your Twitter webpage by clicking on the “bar” and “border” squares, respectively.

After you finish doing aesthetic delights, do not forget to save the changes by clicking on the appropriate button at the very bottom. I didn’t notice it at first and, as a result, I had to set up the background and design of my Twitter account all over again. In the same settings window, on the “Profile” tab, you can attach an avatar by selecting the desired picture in the “Image” area.

Select “Profile” from the top settings menu. Here you can make changes to your existing profile data, and I also recommend adding the address of your web project to the “More Info URL” field. Remarkably, he will.

But lately, search engines may still take into account, to one degree or another, backlinks from this microblogging service, which has .

How to use Twitter (now in Russian)?

By selecting the “Notifications” item from the top settings menu, you can configure: about what events you will be sent messages by email, for example, when someone subscribes to your feed (follows you). Directly from the sent letter, you can go to this person’s web page by clicking on his name:

After reading the content of his messages, you can decide whether to subscribe or not subscribe to his Twitter feed. To subscribe you will need to click on the button "Read"(in the English version of the interface - “Follow”, which is where the terms follow, follow or follower come from) in the upper part of the window:

Subscribing to messages from a user or, in other words, “Following” someone on Twitter (Follow) means adding someone to your contact list. This is what we just did by clicking on the “Follow” button.

But that user won't be able to see your news until they add you to their contact list. The easiest way to create a list of contacts on Twitter is to add people with similar interests. You will add them, and they will add you.

To do this, you can use Twitter search - http://search.twitter.com/. Enter your interests in the search bar and as a result you will receive a huge list of inhabitants of this service who are interested in the same thing. Requests, of course, can be entered in Russian too.

As soon as you add people to your contact list, their messages will appear in your feed. To get into your news feed you just need to go to TWITTER.COM, click on the “Login” link at the very top of the window and enter your username and password specified during registration.

If the browser remembers your login and password, then after going to the above address you will immediately be taken to the news feed with messages from those Twitter users you follow.

If you don’t like the posts of a user and you don’t want to read them anymore, you can unsubscribe from receiving messages from this user by going to his page (feed). To do this, you will need to click either on his name or on his avatar in the message. On his Twitter page, hover your mouse over the “Following” button, which will change to "Cancel", and click on it:

There are a few other little buttons there that will help you receive messages from that user on your cell phone, etc. You can write your message on Twitter in the form provided at the very top home page with an inscription "What's happening?". When you start typing a message, you will see the number of characters that can still be typed to the bottom right of this form. In, but for this you will always have to have them at hand, because you will not find a built-in tooltip like VKontakte in this social network.

To reply to an existing message on Twitter, simply move your mouse cursor over it and click on the inscription that appears at the bottom of the message "Answer"(in English - “Reply”).

After this, the name of the user whose message you are going to write a reply to will automatically be added to the reply form, and this name will be preceded by an @ sign, meaning that this is, in fact, a reply.

Often messages are read through specialized programs, and not through an Internet browser. There are quite a lot of such programs. Can send private messages via Twitter, which will not be seen by other users. To do this, the recipient must follow you, then you can on his web page, by analogy with the unsubscribe method discussed just above, click on the arrow next to the button resembling a sun and select “Direct message username” from the drop-down list.

To summarize, we can make a generalization and say that Twitter is a service that is an explosive mixture of a blog and ICQ. But still, this is not really a blog. It is a means of communication and obtaining information. With it, you can meet people you are interested in, even if you are not added to each other’s contact list.

If the person you want is not subscribed to your updates, you can still reply to their messages by simply pasting them into the reply form name with @ sign in front. As a result, he will notice you and you will be able to finish using any form convenient for you (icq, etc.).

Well, besides this, of course, Twitter can bring visitors to your site in an amount proportional to the number of your followers if, for example, you set up automatic posting of the headlines of your new materials. But I’ll tell you about this and that and setting up posting there the titles of new articles from your website in the next article.

By the way, Twitter developers recently launched another social project, albeit one aimed at users of mobile gadgets - . It is now rapidly gaining popularity, so I advise you to read the article linked to it in order to, so to speak, keep up with life...

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site

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I'm new to Twitter. Where to start?

Let's assume that you already have a Twitter account(s) (you registered them yourself or bought them somewhere) and now you need to start promoting them and filling them with content. Below we will tell you step by step how to do this competently and safely.

Basic Concepts

• Account- Twitter page like http://twitter.com/MY_ACCOUNT. The user receives MY_ACCOUNT (aka login) upon registration. The login can only contain Latin letters, numbers and the "_" sign. Each account is unique. You can log in to your account either by specifying your username and password, or by e-mail (specified during registration) and password.
• Ban account– blocking (suspension) of a Twitter account for one reason or another. The owner of the account can log into such an account, but tweets from a blocked account are not visible to other users.
• Followers- those Twitter accounts that you follow. The number of followers is displayed in your account.
• Followers (readers)- those Twitter accounts that follow you. The number of followers is displayed in your account.
• Tweet- a message up to 140 characters in length, which the owner of the Twitter account posts on his Twitter account. After posting a tweet, it is added to the account owner’s feed and also appears in the feeds of followers of this account. The number of tweets is displayed in your account.
• Tweet ID- a unique (within the Twitter service) numerical value that allows you to distinguish one tweet from another.
• Retweet- transferring a tweet from another account to your feed. A retweet becomes visible to all followers of this account.
• Replay- public appeal on behalf of one account to another account. The replay is visible to all followers of this account.
• DM (direct message)- a private message that is visible only to the sender and recipient.
• Follow- increase the number of those you read.
• Unfollow- reduce the number of those you read.

What is Twitter for?

Twitter is typically used for three things:

• This is exactly what it was created for - for communication, traffic to the site, etc.
• For SEO activity.
• For monetization (which does not exclude the first two points of this list).

In the first case, you will need a live audience interested in what you are writing about. For example, if you have an account for an online store of goods for car enthusiasts, this means that you will need readers who are car owners. From lovers of, for example, pets, most likely you will not receive any communication, no clicks to your site, or retweets.

In the second case, everything is not so categorical. Here, the usual task is to push new pages into the search engine index using Twitter and/or raise pages higher from the TOP for low-frequency queries. The live audience is not important here, rather the number of followers is important. But here, too, you need to understand that if all your followers are bots, then such an account may simply be ignored by search engines.

How and what to fill your Twitter account with?

Before starting promotion, Twitter accounts need to be prepared - set a custom avatar, change the background, fill out the “About Me” field and then start filling it with content.

Content means posting tweets, as well as activities such as replies and retweets. For each of these actions in the program Twidium Accounter there is a project of the same name. There is also a project that allows you to quickly change your avatar, background, description, etc. in a whole group of Twitter accounts. You can get acquainted with each of the projects by reading the program help:.

How to promote a Twitter account?

Promotion of Twitter accounts means increasing the number of readers (followers). In addition to the obvious way - to talk about your wonderful Twitter account everywhere, there is a purely technical method called “mass following”. Its essence is to find and follow Twitter accounts that are similar in topic to your account. After receiving a friend request, the account owner will visit you. If you have an interesting account, he will follow it back.

Our program takes care of searching for thematic accounts and following them. Twidium Inviter. As you work on your account, the number of accounts you read will first increase. After some time, the number of people reading you will begin to grow. Then you can unsubscribe from those you no longer want to read. IN Twidium Inviter this process is called "Unfollowing".

You can read about how to safely promote Twitter accounts in our manual on the page.

Over time, social media must evolve and change. People get tired of having a lot of information and want simple communication. This is precisely the purpose for which Twitter was created. We will tell you what Twitter is, why it is needed, and how it functions as a social network. Find out everything you need to know about this service from the article.

What is Twitter?

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Distinctive features

Twitter is an ideal tool for correspondence. Each user of the service has the opportunity to try themselves as a creator of text components. You will have any publication style at your disposal, as well as any format.

Large corporations use the network because it is convenient to place advertisements and notify customers about the release of new products, promotions and upcoming news.

The network is convenient to use for organizing feedback in case of consideration of complaints, suggestions and answers to other questions.

Thanks to this network, it is possible to inform customers about the latest news, publications, bonuses and upcoming competitions.

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All Twitter users are divided into several categories:

• Reader. Users who are tired of searching for information. The brevity of news on Twitter allows people to save a lot of personal time. They only read other people's posts, and almost never write anything themselves.
• Communication. These are people who not only read other people’s posts, but also actively participate in correspondence. They have their own pages where they express their thoughts and impressions, and also retweet messages from other users.
• Business. People who are registered on the network and conduct business with its help. Some posts are purely advertising.

Twitter Rules

In order for your page to be popular, you must adhere to certain rules, and then you are more likely to achieve success.

Attracting followers. You need to skillfully publish posts, take non-standard steps, and play a game with readers. This is the only way to attract people who will regularly retweet your page.

What can you post on your feed?

• Don't post promotional tweets;
• Constantly retweet messages from famous people.
• Do not post about politics or religion.
• Write each post in your feed at least 3 times;
• The ratio of tweets to replies should be 3:1.

Choose the right time to post. Posts should be posted at times when people are most active. If we are talking about our time zone, then we need to do this from ten in the morning to twelve in the afternoon.

If you target users from other countries, consider their local time.

Write a lot. Constantly update your feed, this is the only way you will be able to retain your readers and receive new tweets from them.

Just consider the fact that you can post up to 1000 tweets per day and no more than 60 per hour.

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Hide unnecessary information. The user can disable the display of retweets of individual users in the personal feed. This will help in case someone gets too interested in your page.

You can also replace tweets using key phrases. This is useful if a user's personal feed is in competition with another user.

Write quotations without quotation marks. Do not use direct speech in your posts, this will make them simpler and more accessible.

Present quotes in series. This will allow you to understand where the quote is and where the author’s words are.

Technologically, such a publication will only be your tweet, and after RT you can write whatever you want, in this way you can prank inexperienced readers.

Don't fawn. Don’t elevate yourself above other users, as you could lose all your subscribers and future clients.

Don't clog the tape. It happens that during a discussion people just start talking about their own things, and generally forget where it all started. To avoid this, immediately delete comments from people who are not relevant to the topic.

Don't bother with text formatting. Twitter doesn't pay attention to punctuation marks in correspondence. Follow only one rule: do not start a sentence with a capital letter and do not put a period at the end.

What does it mean to tweet and retweet?

Tweet on Twitter- this means leaving a small message that will not exceed 140 characters. If you want to share important news, write a text and click on the “Tweet” button.

The page will contain buttons for many social networks; if you liked some article, click on the button with the image of a bird and the inscription “Tweet”. After this, a link to the article you liked will appear in your personal feed.

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Retweet- means posting posts on your personal feed that were taken from other users.

To perform this action, you need to go to the other person’s page and hover your mouse over the 2 green arrows that are located under the message. After you click on the “Retweet” button, the post you liked will appear in the feed on your page.

The more interesting your posts are for other readers, the more people will retweet them.

This function immediately found application on all kinds of services that monitor the number of retweets made by readers, and thus create a user popularity rating.

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What to write on Twitter?

You can write whatever you want online. Share interesting news and facts so you can interest people. If you present interesting facts, they will interest other readers who will follow your new posts.

Subjects for SMS can be:

• business news;
• upcoming promotions;
• interesting photos and video materials;
• links to useful facts and sites;
• discussion of important issues;
• consultations and advice on various issues.

If you use the network correctly, other users will turn to you for advice on a specific issue. People will see that you post the latest news and will constantly visit your page.

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Twitter Dictionary

Before registering online, you should study the terminology to understand what and how. Thanks to this, you can quickly navigate and protect yourself from mistakes.

List of popular terms:

Tweet (post) – a message written by a user;

Retweet – posts that are quoted by other users;

Follower – a user who has subscribed to another person’s page;

Hashtags are tags written in Latin letters with a hash symbol in front of them, with the help of which you can find interesting topics;

The feed is the place where tweets and retweets are posted;

Tweeple is an active network user who leaves a lot of posts every day;

Twitterers are people who use the service.

Social networks are the most visited Internet services, not counting search engines. Twitter stands apart from popular portals such as Facebook, VKontakte and Instagram. If you are not yet a user, then you are probably asking the same question as your “colleagues”: “What is Twitter and why is it needed?” By the way, it’s a good question. And we will try to answer it as detailed and accessible as possible.

About the history of appearance

Have you noticed that most inventions were originally created for use in a very narrow circle of people? This is what happened with Facebook, for example. A similar situation occurred with Twitter. In 2006, Odeo launched a small research project codenamed "twttr". The essence of the service was the exchange of short messages within the company. At the same time, the participants in this network had to answer a fairly simple question: “What are you doing now?”

The main developer of the project was Jack Dorsey. It was he who owned the first tweet in the history of Twitter, dated March 26, 2006. The message contained a short phrase “just setting up my twttr” (“just setting up my twttr”). Already in July of the same year, the public version of the service was launched. And in April 2007, the social network became owned by the company of the same name, Twitter Inc.

Twitter's breakthrough as a powerful communication service came at the annual SXSW festival in 2007. On the day of the festival, the number of tweets tripled, and the social network itself received extremely positive reviews from critics. As a result, the number of service users began to grow exponentially. Naturally, at first people needed minimal instructions to understand how to interact within the portal. But, fortunately, the interface was immediately intuitive, and the problem of misunderstanding was quickly resolved.

Over the course of its existence, Twitter has received several notable updates regarding both the interface and the operating algorithm. Versions for mobile devices were created, as well as separate clients for using the service on a computer.

The number of registered users at the time of writing exceeded one billion and amounted to 1.3 billion accounts. The service's profit, according to estimates for 2015, was $521 million.

What is Twitter

History is history, but a specific question brought you here: “What is Twitter for in general? What kind of social network is this?” After all, it really is not visually similar to the services we are used to for virtual communication. There are no photo albums, no profiles, and even the admins don’t force you to write your real names - you can introduce yourself as anyone, even a brick from house number three on Bloshinnaya Street.

Actually, Twitter visually represents a long feed of posts from the users you follow. The funny thing about the posts is that their length was initially limited to 140 characters. And only in 2017, Twitter management finally introduced into the service the ability to write texts up to 280 characters long. By the way, the users themselves were even somewhat upset by this update: after all, for 10 years, the main feature of the social network was the need to fit their thoughts into these short 140 characters. This was annoying at times, but definitely added some charm to the service.

As for user interaction, it is based on the following concepts:

• Follower, also known as subscriber. A user who has subscribed to your page. You can follow other users, i.e. subscribe to their pages on social networks.
• Tweet. This is the post itself.
• Retweet. Publishing another user's tweet on your page while preserving the original source.
• Comment. Aka reply. In Russian, a response to a tweet.
• PM or direct. These are personal messages - communication between two users in a personal chat.
• Trends. These are the hot topics that are being written about the most at the moment.
• Hashtags. Captions for posts that allow you to quickly find information on a topic of interest.

Your News Feed is actually made up of tweets posted by the people you follow. Posts are displayed in chronological order. However, some time ago, tweets began to appear at the top of the Feed, which, according to the system that analyzes your activity, may be most interesting to you.

Thus, Twitter is a microblog based on the principle of subscriptions. We’ll talk about why this service is needed in the next section of the article.

What is Twitter for?

Since Twitter is positioned as a social network, then, accordingly, its main goal is to create conditions for users to communicate. A logical question: “How to communicate on Twitter if it is so different from VK or FB?” It's simple. Firstly, you also have access to personal messages, i.e. direct Secondly, the main communication is based on commenting on the published tweets of other users. Sometimes there are so many answers to one post that you even start to get confused.

But, of course, communication is only part of the possibilities. In fact, the service is used for other purposes:

• News tracking/broadcasting;
• Creating a blog for profit;
• Advertising.

People often start using Twitter to follow current news. It is through this service that people around the world quickly publish important information, be it a minor accident on a nearby street or a significant political event. Given the small length of the post, the information is presented in a concise form, which allows you to get mostly facts.

The second purpose of Twitter is to create a commercial blog. This is not the primary goal of the social network, but cunning users quickly learned how to make a profit. In fact, you create a microblog, fill it with interesting content and promote yourself. And then, according to the standard scheme of modern social networks, you get the opportunity to earn money through advertising.

And, by the way, about advertising. Many brands make their presence known through this popular service. Of course, for specific advertising posts, Twitter is a stretch – it’s still better to turn to standard social networks, such as VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. However, Twitter microblogs can also work if directed correctly. And all because useful or interesting information is shared quite quickly on Twitter. But here, of course, you need to hook followers, existing and potential, and wisely promote your account.

We hope we were able to clearly explain how to use Twitter and what it is for. Still have questions? Comments are always open - ask!

Tweet. If you want your followers to know what you're up to right now, post a tweet. Remember that you are limited to 280 characters, otherwise, if you exceed this limit, you will not be able to send a tweet.

• The characters will be counted automatically. The number of symbols remaining will be shown in grey, after 10 it will be shown in red, and then when you reach zero a big red minus will appear.

Use hashtags. A hashtag is a word preceded by a hash sign, #. Using hashtags you can easily find the right word. Read our guide on using hashtags on Twitter.

• Some trends contain hashtags themselves, allowing users to discuss something all over Twitter.
• A good example of using hashtags is when everything related to a particular football team is tagged with a hashtag with its name.