Exposed, the Watkins Lady’s secret life!

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Are you wondering what’s all the twitter is about, or are you a Twitter nut like me? What all the twitter updates on this blog didn’t give it away? Well in case you don’t know, twitter is a social networking and/or microblogging platform, depending on who you ask. Don’t mistake it for an instant messaging client though, it’s far more powerful than that!

I touched on using twitter when I talked about The Basics For Using Social Bookmarking And Social Media but here’s more details for you about how it works and how to get the most out of it. With Twitter you post short, up to 140 character messages and all your friends or followers can read your posts and you can read the messages from the people you follow as well. You can include links in your twitter messages which is handy for several reasons; like sharing interesting, funny or informational web pages with your friends or asking for feed back on a topic. You can also reply or send a message to a specific person using the @ symbol before their user name like this @watkins_lady but they aren’t private. Direct messages can be used for private comments or discussions.

There are a number of ways you can use twitter. You can post and read tweets right on your twitter page but there are a ton of applications or clients that work with twitter so you can virtually tweet all over the place. Not only on the web, but from your black berry or cell phone too. You can find a huge list of various multi-platform apps here.

Here’s a video of how to get signed up with twitter:

A couple of my personal favorite Firefox extensions for tweeting are Twitbin so you can easily post your tweets in a side bar that also shows other’s posts. Twitterbar which is a handy way to post the link to a site you are visiting and comment right in your address bar. You can find them both here, plus some others.

As I mentioned above, Twitter is one form of Microblogging, so if you have no time to blog it might be the solution for you. Then if you like you can even post your daily tweets to your blog with a handy Word Press plugin like I do. (There’s a link to the wordpress plugin I use on the pages that have my updates so I won’t included it again.)

Bloggers can use Twitter Feed which does just that, feeds your blog posts to twitter.

Wondering who’s following you? Twitter Karma will show you! This makes it easy to add more friends as well.

Looking for more friends and people to follow? Look no further than your community with Twubble which searches through your friends list to see who’s following who and then makes suggestions on who else you might want to follow.

There are a number of lists of twitter users, you’ll find The ultimate list of Mom’s on Twitter here or how about the ultimate list of Dads and husbands on Twitter and Top Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter here. Those will give you a good start!

If you are bored, you can watch the world twitter with Twittervision this is a cool world map that shows people’s tweets and their location! Totally cool, for a few minutes anyways! From the same developer, Twitter search is a handy search tool to see who’s tweeting about a certain topic or key word.

Want to post to twitter while you are away or busy with something else? Tweet Later is a niffty tool that will schedule your posts for a later date, you can also use it to send yourself reminders via twitter.

Got a burning question or need an opinion about something? How about using Poll Daddy’s Twitter polls! You can quickly create a poll and post it as your Twitter status.

It’s important to know that anything you post on twitter can be read by anyone via the public time line and various feeds so don’t post your personal, private information or your top secret plans! You’ll also want to familiarize yourself with The Unwitten Rules of Social Media Marketing if you plan to use it for business.

The Twittersphere is a lot like the “real” world, it’s about communities, having a conversation, getting to know people and letting them get to know you, which is really awesome. Join in the fun and follow the Watkins_lady if you like!

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