Why should you use a twitter account?

There are a couple of good answers. Most business people will now be looking for a combination of “will”, “increase” and “sales”, but it’s not that simple. If you do it right, it might create a better relation to your customers, empowers you for more direct communication and that also only if your target group uses twitter. Furthermore will it not help throwing out random links to your homepage or products, if it is not new, relaunched, changed, or in a conversation. Sounds easy? No, but that’s why there are multimedia designers like me
As a private user you can promote your private projects, network close and instantly with friends or just stay up to date with your favourite celebrities breakfast sandwich. BOOOORING. At least the last.
If you, like me, are becoming a multimedia designer, study something in relation marketing, no matter if it is internet related or not, you definitely should have a Twitter account. If you ever, possibly by a client, boss, co-worker or a just a possible client at a party at very unlikely circumstances could be confronted with the question: “What about social media?”.
Sounds like it’s never gonna happen? Don’t think so. I’m not a god of social media and I don’t even have a lot of followers, but my count is growing (feel free to follow if you find the first peek at my time line interesting ).

I use Twitter connected to other social communities which makes my tweets, apart from retweets and mentions visible on for example facebook. When I find something interesting or funny, that my friends could like, I tweet it, if I find it has not been seen, is brand new or just legendary. Furthermore I tweet new blog entries (more in depth about new things or things new to me) or portfolio entries with sets of photos, posters or code snippets.

Here comes the first day of my little Twitter introduction. I think everybody on my education (multimedia designers) should experience Twitter and know how to use it, because our education includes knowledge about internet branding and social media. Let’s start out from scratch. No really, this is aiming for the point of account creation. If you’re further and know the terms, just skip this part.

Twitter
Twitter is a microblogging service run by the Twitter Inc. It gives people the ability to share messages of exactly 140 characters.
Wikipedia says:

Twitter was produced in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July. Since then Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 200 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day.

tweet
A short message sent through twitter.

retweet
A retweet is a repetition of somebody else’ tweet, you chose to spread to your followers.

TL / timeline
A timeline is a chronical collection of tweets. Your timeline would consist of your tweets and retweets. Your friends timeline a collection of theirs and so on.

hashtag / tag
These are used to flag certain content that belongs to a specific topic or field. If I’d be tweeting about a new lense, I bought for my camera, I’d add #photography #lense #Tamron (just to make a point) and to make it easy to find for people, looking for tweets on a certain topic.

lists
You can create lists to sort people after location, topic or something you think connects them. Lists are followable, as persons.

For more basics, visit the twitter help center: http://support.twitter.com