Twitter is a free social networking service that allows you to micro-blog by sending short “updates” of 140 characters or less to others via a text message from your mobile phone, by typing a message from the Twitter site or using instant messaging from Jabber or Google Talk. Twitter is the most widely used microblogging network in the world. Micro-blogging is a very powerful and increasingly popular way to communicate with friends and clients, build buzz, and generate prospective business leads. Many celebrities, as well as popular bloggers and writers, use Twitter to network with friends in real time.

Avery powerful and increasingly popular way to communicate with friends and clients, build buzz, and generate prospective business leads is through micro-blogging. Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows you to write brief text updates, usually less than 200 characters, and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group you choose. Micro-blogging is a form of social networking that enables you to keep your followers up-to-date with what you are doing at any given time of the day. The most widely used micro-blogging network is Twitter. Twitter, located at www.twitter.com, is a free social networking service that allows you to micro-blog by sending short “updates” of 140 characters or less to others via a text message from your mobile phone, by typing a message from the Twitter site, or by using instant messaging from Jabber or Google Talk. Keep in mind that when you sign up for Twitter via the Twitter Web site, your communication settings are automatically set to public.

By keeping your communication settings to public, your updates automatically go to both your friends and to the public timeline, which is automatically posted and updated for public viewing every four minutes to the Twitter Web site. If you intend to use Twitter to build buzz about your business or generate traffic to your Web site, keep the public settings. One of the ways you can use Twitter to generate Web site traffic and buzz is by sharing daily deals, special offers, or exciting product news with your readers. If you have an e-commerce Web site, you may want to send out a message each morning announcing your top-selling products. For example, “Yesterday we sold over 1,000 red widgets. We have less than that left in inventory, so order now to guarantee shipment.”

Twitter is a tool that allows you to quickly communicate and share news with your friends and within the Twitter community. For example, if you manage a music Web site, you can use Twitter to break news about concerts and entertainment gossip. To promote yourself or your Web site, you can simply include a tag at the end of each message such as “Brought to you by X.com.” You can send any of your friends a private message using Twitter. To send a friend a text message, click Message from the Twitter profile page or simply click Direct Messages and choose the recipient from the drop-down box. If you want to send a private message from your phone, use the following command: D + username + message. Note that a person’s username and screen name may be different. To ensure that your private message is sent to the proper person, you can verify the accuracy of the person’s username by going to her profile page and looking at the URL at the top of the page. The username follows the www.twitter.com domain: for example, www.twitter.com/kingpepper.