What’s Twitter and why should I care?

I’m assuming that not everyone in the world knows what Twitter is, and those that aren’t aware of it aren’t following us. With this being said, I thought I’d give a brief intro describing what Twitter is, so you all can start following 6rounds :)

According to Wikipedia, “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access.”

So what does all of this really mean and why oh why should I care? Well that was what I thought to myself when I first heard about Twitter. Over the past couple of months however, I’ve really been getting into it, and moreover I’m understanding how and why Twitter is changing the landscape of how people interact with each other.

So how do people use twitter? Well there are many ways but I’m going to differentiate between them by dividing them into two categories:

1. For Personal Use: to communicate with friends and family, for personal branding, to look for jobs, to update friends, to read news, to make new friends, to network, and to socialize.

2. For Business Use: for branding, to advertise vacant positions, to communicate with customers, to spread the word about something, for press releases distribution, to provide live coverage on events and to notify customers.

Once you have an account you can bring in your friends by importing your e-mail contact list. Basically what you do is find people that you wish to follow. Following someone will allow you to see updates of what they write, when they write it. For me, I follow friends, News, Businesses and really anything that I find interesting and want to read about.

What you need to know when you’re writing your own tweet is that when you’re referring to another user you put an @ sign before the username and if you are referring to a subject or a trend you put a # before, here are a few examples:

• Hey @6rounds, you rock!
• @6rounds I love your interactive video experience :)
• I had a great chat with @ReadyToShine on @6rounds #videochat #cool.
• Yo, @ReadyToShine, meet you at #Starbucks in 20mins…

After you’ve signed up to Twitter, check out 6rounds account and follow us there. We tweet about blog posts that have been published, interesting things we find, cool people we meet, publish our press releases and basically interact with the Twitter world. It’s a lot of fun and we love meeting new people so be sure to follow us.