twitter for journalists

Depending on whether you use Twitter's website or a third-party Twitter client (see the Clients section for more info on this), you'll initiate a post in different ways. On Twitter.com, you'll see a big text field labeled "What's happening?"

As you probably know, you only have 140 characters* to work with. That includes spaces, punctuation and numbers, so learn to be direct in what you say. While the character constraint may seem frustrating at first, you'll quickly discover that this weakness is also one of Twitter's great strengths, since it forces everyone to get straight to the point, and makes your information streams easy to scan.

The reason for the 140 character limit goes back to Twitter’s origins as a text-message-based service. While few people use Twitter via text message anymore, Twitter has maintained the 140 character limit, which has become one of the service's defining features.

Updates are great ways to share thoughts, insights, analyses, reactions and links. As you enter text into the field, look for the character counter showing how many characters you have remaining.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter is a public medium. Almost all posts are public, and can be seen by followers and non-followers alike. Google and other search engines aggressively index Twitter content — what you say on Twitter will surface in search results almost immediately - more on that later.

We'll explore the finer points of mentions, "@" replies, retweets, direct messages, hash tags, lists and more in the following sections. For more, check out Twitter's official glossary.