If you know me, than you know I’m a huge fan of Twitter. Twitter, although hard to explain to your average web 2.0-illiterate person, is really quite simple. I thought, ok, if I had to explain Twitter to my Mom and she could understand it, than anyone could. I have yet to successfully explain gmail to my Mom so you can see what I’m working with here.

To define Twitter in the most simplistic way is easy: twitter is 140-characters-or-less-microblogging.  For each “blog” posted, you have 140 characters (not words) to get your message across.  Across to who?  Well, whoever thinks your interesting enough to follow.  Twitter is also social messaging.  Twitter is also news reporting.  It is anything you want it to be, without having to type a lot and these days, who has time to do that?

So who follows you and who do you follow?  That is a good question and one that I will answer shortly. First, I ask you to stop reading and go join Twitter.  Once you’ve joined, come back here and read this super awesome tutorial that explains everything you may (or may not) have wanted to know about Twitter. But first, follow me. There’s my shameless self-indulgent plug.  Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, you may read on.

Ok, so you’ve caved in and joined Twitter.  Now you must follow people. Simply click on the “find people” link and go to town.

Think of your interests.  Do you like news?  cats?  chocolate? cooking?  UFOs?  Do a search for whatever topics tickles your fancy and see what comes up.  As you can see from the exibit A below, I typed in “news” to the search box under “find people” and low and behold, a list of many news sources are filtered. For example: cnnbrk aka CNN Breaking News has 1,598,634 followers placing them at the top of the search results.  The number of followers decrease as you go down the list.  Following a person or organization on Twitter is so easy, even your Mom could do it (well, not my Mom… yet). Just click on “Follow” and voila! you will now see that person’s updates on your personal feed.

Fortunately for you and your gazillion or so gmail contacts, Twitter, like any well oiled social network, always has the ability to import contacts from outside sources.  See exhibit C.

I highly recommend you check out the suggested users; it’s a library list of celebs, famous personalities, interesting politicians and other people who probably have no relevance to your interests but are highly entertaining.  I recommend you start off by following 100 or so interesting people plus your closest friends and family members.

The next step on the Twitter learning curve is to learn the Twitter lingo, use it (don’t abuse it) and learn how to promote yourself as an interesting person that everyone and their mother (but mine) would want to follow.  By doing this, y0u will soon be on your way to gaining multitudes of followers each and every day.

What do I do to get more followers?

I always say to people engage, don’t enrage.  There are certain silent rules with Twitter that will give you that extra edge if you know them well and follow them silently.  Some of the rules you will learn as you go, others I will graciously tell you now so that you may look like less of an idiot when you are tempted to ask questions like ‘what the f does follow friday mean?’  Here are a list of popular Twitter terms and situations that you absolutely MUST know. Grab a pen. Take notes.

Followers and Following -- The upper right hand corner of your homepage shows you the number of people who are following you, the numbers of followers you have and the number of updates you have submitted, to date.  See exhibit A.

@PersonsTwitterName -- When someone types in @PersonsTwitterName in their Twitter status update box, it automatically links that peron’s Twitter name in the feed.  See exibit F.  As you can see, OliviaWilder responded to me by typing @ReneeGannon in her update box. This has hyperlinked my Twitter name.  This means that EVERYONE who is following OliviaWilder can now see my name as well. Why is this important? Because they can now click on my name, go to my Twitter page and follow me when they realize how awesome and fantastic my Tweets are. See exhibit X.

You can also “respond” to a person’s tweet by clicking on the small arrow on their update.  See exhibit M.

You’ll notice the highlighted 80 in the upper right hand corner. That is simply the number of characters you have left (out 140) for your message.  When you’re done, click reply and in a mere second, your response shows up in your feed and theirs.  Now don’t get too excited yet, there’s more fun where that came from.

RT -- RT means “re-tweet”.  RTing is a courtesy given to re-sharing interesting information that you saw on someone else’s tweet or website.  Sure, you could shamelessly steal the link to that interesting article or that witty pun someone else just posted, but that’s just bad twitter karma.  RTing is crediting your source. You would do it in a research paper or even a blog article, you should do it in Twitter too.  It’s a nice and friendly way to say “I think this person is so cool, I’m going to pass on what they said and give you the opportunity to follow them.”  The more you retweet stuff, the more people will be willing to retweet what you say too.  Spread the love, people, spread the love.  You will notice a marked increase in followers the more you RT people’s stuff and they return the favor.  See exhibit 12.

You will also start to see “retweet” icons on web pages, making it easy for people to share articles quickly and easily from site-to-twitter in rapid way.  Time is money, so any site that makes Tweeting an interesting article easiest, already has the edge.  Mashable does a fine job of this. See exibit 1-C. Notice the retweet button that lists the number of times this particular article has been RT’d on Twitter.  Super cool.

Tiny URL -- TinyUrl.com. Everyone knows that a looong URL can pretty much kill all of your 140 character allowance.  Using tinyurl.com allows you to shorten that long URL into a tiny one that you can copy, paste and re-share with minimal character usage.  Bigger is not always better.

Follow Friday or #FF or #followfriday- Follow Friday occurs every Friday and was created by some brilliant person who probably didn’t have enough followers.  It’s a way for people to give shout-outs to multiple Twitter users who they want their Twitter followers to follow. I know that sounds confusing. It’s like standing on your Twitter soapbox and yelling “Hey you guys!!!! Follow these people!!”  The idea is that your followers will follow those people and vice versa. Follow Friday is a good day to increase your followers.   The more shout-outs you give to others usually means the more chances you have of getting FF shout-outs from others.  You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.  There’s that itch, right in the middle <scratch, scratch>.  It feels so good.

Direct Messages or DM: A little thank you goes a long way with Twitter and direct messaging is a great way to do that.  Direct messaging is also great if you want to send someone a more personal note that is not broadcasted for all to read.  Not everyone has direct messaging enabled (most celebs and large organizations don’t), but if they do, it’s like sending someone a short, 140-charactered email. To send a message, simply click on said person’s Twitter page, and click on “message”.  Start typing.  Hit send. Easy, right?

To read your own direct messages, go to your own Twitter page and click on “Direct Messages”. It tells you how many you have and who they are from.

#Hashtags: Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. What?  Ok basically hashtags were developed as a means to create ”groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. First, follow @hashtags on Twitter. They will follow you back automatically, and your hashtags will be tracked. Next, start using hashtags in your tweets, preceding key words.  I don’t use hashtags that much, but it all depends on your personal Twitter preference.

Trending Topics -- Ok, you’ve admitted to be an ‘in-the-know’ junkie.  You want to know what people are talking about.  You love to know what the most popular topics are and get in on the action.  If you do, than Twitter is definitely the place for you.  On the right side of everyone’s Twitter page is a list of “Trending Topics”. They are basically a list of real-time keywords that are the most popularly or widely used words on Twitter at any given moment.  Many are references to current events or breaking news.  Others are random or funny terms that probably make no sense without doing further research.  You can click on any trending topic to see exactly what people are saying about them.  You can also search for ANY topics on Twitter using the handy, dandy Twitter search page. For trending topics, see exhibit $.

As you can see, most of those probably don’t make sense to you.  I’m going to click on “Hulu Desktop” and see what people are saying about it.  As you can see, it appears that Hulu has offered a desktop application. Cool!  You can follow the links people are sharing and in no time, you’ll be accessing Hulu from your desktop too. If you want to get listed in any trending topic feed, all you have to do is mention the trending topic at hand.  Now don’t try to get crafty and start listing ALL the Trending Topics in one update.  That is considered to be spamming and is BAD Twitter ettiquette.  Be a good tweeter, not a bad one.

Twitter Applications -- With every rock solid social network comes a plethora of applications that are designed to make your internet addictions just a tad bit easier.  Developers have been working furiously to come up with the most awesome, user-friendly Twitter applications possible.  There is TwitterFox, Twhirl, Tweetdeck, Twitpic and the list goes on.  Without going into details, you can check out this super cool article from TechCrunch that lists the Top 21 Twitter Applications available.

The Twitter Language -- A new twitter language has developed since the birth of Twitter and it’s increasing popularity.  I believe that evolution will soon lead us to a new Twitter-super-race where people speak in Twitongues, referencing Twitter happenings and phenoma that are beyond comprehension to the English language.  To brush up on your Twitter language, check out the Twittonary (the Twitter Dictionary).  It’s addicting. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

All in all, Twitter is a fun and easy application that allows you to stay in the know, connect with interesting people and waste time when you should be working.  Don’t tell your boss that you’re reading this article.  Twitter can become an addiction or just a fun way to pass the time while you surf the net.  Twitter can be your dream come true or your wildest nightmare.  Before you let Twitter take ahold of your life, you can now feel informed before taking the plunge.  There is still so much about Twitter that I didn’t list here.  If I forgot something important, feel free to leave it as a comment.  I’m still learning, just as you are.   You’re probably sick of reading this anyway and my fingers hurt from typing so I am ending this now.  Good luck with Twitter; I hope it becomes everything you ever hoped it would be.  Now stop reading this article and follow me already!  Feel free to RT this article if you like it.  I’m just sayin’!

As a bonus, I’ve included this highly entertaining twitter song. Enjoy!