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Twitter is a free service that allows users to publish short messages of 140 characters or less. These messages are read by "followers" — people who make a conscious decision to subscribe to your messages and have them delivered to their own Twitter home pages.

The site will tell you that "Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

You post is known as a "Tweet." In the social media and social networking industry, Twitter facilitates a process known as microblogging.

Every user is identified by putting an "@" sign in front of their name, like @remax_prestige

You go to share common interests and ask insightful questions, and, ideally, read the interesting answers you get back, says Laura Fitton (@pistachio), co-author of Twitter For Dummies

Fitton says, Twitter is about "what has my attention right now?" In fact, "The point of Twitter is what do we have in common or are we having some kind of shared experience."

Use Twitter to keep people in their personal life updated, Twitter has developed a business following. People in a particular industry (like real estate) often use Twitter to keep up with news, opinion and happenings in their field.

We will show you how this information will come to you.

“Facebook is closed, Twitter is open. Facebook is structured. Twitter is scattered. Facebook is people you’ve known, and many you might have wanted to forget; Twitter is people you never knew, but might have wanted to meet.”

You will get more followers if you have a photo of yourself

You will get more followers if you have a catchy profile about who you are

"The people you choose to follow should bring something compelling to your life," says Fitton. "I feel sad people think that it’s important to follow a ton of random people or have people with a lot of followers to be important or get value from Twitter."

When you sign up for Twitter, you will be promoted to search for friends from your Gmail or Yahoo Mail accounts

Also, you can use Twitter's search tool to look for people that might be twittering in real estate

You don't need to know people personally, but they should relate to your interests. You also might want to follow people publishing links in our industry.

@InmanNews@Realtors@askNAR@RealtorMag@WomansCouncil

People will begin following you. Before you follow back, make sure you're going to get something substantive out of their tweet

With Twitter, information flows to you, in contrast to more traditional mediums such as a news website, where you must click around and seek out information on your own. On Twitter, after you select followers, the information just comes to you.

It's important to remember that Twitter is a publishing medium. In many cases, Tweets can be picked up by Google. So remember what you say, especially if you tend to talk business over Twitter (as many people do).

Because a Tweet is so short, it's even harder than e-mail for people to pick up context or tell when you're being sarcastic versus serious, Fitton says.

There is a Replies tab that chronicles when your friends decide to comment on your message with one of their own. There is also an archive tab that logs your updates and an "everyone" tab that shows the updates of all Twitter users (provided they made their feed publicly accessible).

Replies are the only way to get your message to show up on their wall if you are not being followed by that person

Remember that if you Reply to someone, it goes out to the entire Twitter world

If you want to keep it confidential send a DIRECT MESSAGE

You CAN’T DM if they are not following you

People will frequently repeat your tweet for their own followers. This is known as re-tweeting.

You can do so by pressing the Retweet Button or typing RT at the twitter address of the person you are re-tweeting

A Twitter App is a downloadable client program that les you manage your updates and Twitter feeds from your desktop, Ipad, or Smartphone

www.TweetDeck.comwww.Twhirl.orgwww.HootSuite.com (my fav)Or simply www.Twitter.com

Go to http://twitpic.com and it will allow you to upload photos that you can tweet out!

You can always tweet links…in fact most people do tweet links to their blog, website, or other stories

What you must be mindful of is that the link can eat up much of your 140 character word count

You should always shorten your links!

www.bit.ly www.tinyurl.com Once shortened…place the link into your tweet

People use the hashtag symbol # before relevant keywords in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets to show more easily in Twitter Search.

Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets in that category. Hashtags can occur anywhere in the Tweet. Hashtagged words that become very popular are often Trending Topics.

Keep a list of you Sphere of Influence Tweeters and really take your Pop Bys to the Next Level!

What’s going on in your dayNew listingsLinks to your blogRetweets of great articlesWhat’s happening around townCountdownsTweets to your FB pagesNews, weather, sportsAnything

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