Created in march 2006 by Jacky Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass, Twitter today has become one of the most powerful social media platforms. In a short period of just 9 years it has gain so much popularity that it’s hard to image the world of social networking without TWITTER. Today it stands at a point where it has more than 500 million users, of which 302 million are active users, 349 tweets per day by its users and 1.6 billion search queries per day. It comes under top ten most-visited websites, and therefore is often named as “the SMS of the internet.” With all this above information, you must have judged that how important it is to know the ABCD of this social networking platform. You don’t have to go anywhere about knowing the basics of the twitter, you just have to go through this blog to get that.

Twitter Is Not For Me!!
“I get facebook very easily into my mind, but using twitter seems to me as If I am solving any puzzle, of course I have a twitter account , but I have never bothered to open it”. I get to hear this lot from many people! But trust me it’s not that just hard. Yes of course it is different from facebook, but then there have to be some differences to make something unique. I view Twitter as a stage where simultaneously a lot of conversations are running. It’s about Tweet updates, breaking news, helpful info, and conversing with one another, unlike facebook which is all about spouting off your status updates and connecting with your family and friends. Twitter is designed to connect you to interesting people. It’s not about your friends. It’s about your interests.

Understanding The Layout
1. In the above image the arrow marked as number 1 is called the NOTIFICATION BUTTON. Clicking on it will give you the list of tweets where your name is mentioned. Its basically acts as an inbox for you in the Twitter.
2. Clicking on number 2 will land you to your profile page. All your information like your profile photo, your bio, your tweets, your followers and those whom you are following will be shown in this icon.
3. This one is very important; this is where you can compose your tweets!
4. This little link will connect you and suggest you to those people whom you can follow, as they may be similar to the profiles you are following right now. So you can always look at this for suggestions.
5. Trends – On Twitter, hash tags are big. The hash tag is the number sign #. People use this in front of a word (with no space) to help categorize tweets. So for example, every time you write something about your blog, you might add the hash tag #blog. The box points to hash tags that are trending. In other words, what’s popular? If you click on the hash tag, it will show you all the tweets with that keyword. If you want to get more followers, join in and tweet something with that hash tag.
6. This is the search button, as you can see, here you can search for any keyword or any organizations or someone’s name.
7. With each tweet, you are provided with a twitter handle, which provides you with the facility of speaking directly to someone. For doing that you just need to type in their twitter handle and it will be shown up in their connect screen.
8. These are the links which have been posted by people, and these links will redirect you to some another site from where you can read the whole story. 9. You can see there that its written, Retweeted by….” A Retweet is a re-posting of someone else’s Tweet. Twitter’s Retweet feature helps you and others quickly share that Tweet with all of your followers. Sometimes people type RT at the beginning of a Tweet to indicate that they are re-posting someone else’s content. Besides it there is another button, pressing which you can pass along a funny joke, helpful tidbit, etc.
10. The view summary button is a quick way to examine the tweet without having to go to another page. If someone tweets out, “Check out my blog!” and then pastes a link, you can hit view summary and it will give you a snapshot of the website. If you like what you see, click on the link to go there. Sometimes, it won’t say view summary but rather, “Expand” or “View conversation”. When you see a tweet where one person is talking to another, you can hit that button to see what the whole conversation was. It helps to place the tweet in context.
11. If anyone sends you some personal message, then it will be shown in this icon. You can click on this and read your messages.
12. This tab basically helps you in filtering your various conversations. The discover tab allows you to search popular hash tags and keywords.
13. This is the ME tab, by the word itself you can understand that it takes you to your profile page.
14. This gear tab is where you can look into your settings, your privacy settings, your email notifications, background colors’, widgets, etc.
15. You can compose your tweets from here!
16. These grey colored buttons comes after you have read any tweet. You can reply to it, favorite it (which means like it), you can retweet it (which means it immediately gets sent out to your followers), or you can add additional options with extensions (as you see on my screen). The buffer, pocket, and hootsuite help you schedule upcoming tweets and save articles to read later.
Now that you have gained all the knowledge about the basic tabs on twitter, it’s time to start tweeting now. Log in to twitter and start tweeting now! You can make use of popular hash tags so that those people who are looking up for those keywords can easily find you.
The biggest difference between twitter and facebook is you don’t need to follow anyone to say anything about them. One last thing, copy and paste the URL of this post and put it in your tweet. Now hit

TWEET.
When you tweet remember that, Twitter only gives you the power of just using 140 characters for composing your single Tweet. If you have a URL in your tweet , then the Twitter will only take 23 characters for that URL, even if you have a link longer than that, it will be counted as 23 only. Then the rest of the characters you have for your text or hashtags. And if you want to attach any image with your tweet, then it will take another 23 characters for the link to that image. That’s how the Twitter’s mathematics works.
The choice is all yours that whether you want to add pictures to your tweets, or add any links or just want to go with the simple text. Hash tags are always an optional option. Below are depicted some examples of various tweets.
This is a simple text (usually jokes or quotes or something memorable).

This is a tweet with an image, plus a link to a post, and then a hashtag added. The one below is simply a tweet with a link.

To tweet with an image….
Its simple, you just have to click on the compose button , write what you want to and then simply paste a link if you want to, and then hit the camera and upload the image. And you are done with your work!

Engaging on Twitter
After you have followed a few people, go through your feeds, look up for tweets that make some sense to you or interest you. After doing that you have to get that person know about that you enjoyed their tweets. This is a great way to gain new followers and start connecting with people. So I saw this tweet and I hit expand first. (You won’t see it in the screenshot because it now says collapse). As you can see, this woman had several people tweet back and she and them had a conversation. Notice all the options next to collapse? Here they are… Reply to @emilygalik – here you can write right back to her.

Ello is an all-purpose social media network, almost like Facebook or Tumblr, which similarly allows you to forge new connections, share written updates, photos, videos, or any other content that you feel like sharing. The highlight of this platform is that it gives all the control of what they want to see in the hands of its users and claims of not selling its user’s information to any third party. This platform is ad free and does not support any manipulative algorithm that prioritizes paid content over posts by people whom you love and value.

• Retweet – if you like the tweet, you can retweet it. This means it shows up to all your other followers.
• Favorite – This is just like the “like” button on Facebook.
• More – If you click on this, you have the option of embedding the tweet directly onto your blog or emailing it to someone.

I want to say something private. Then what?
At the very top of your screen you can see a little mailbox, you just have to click on it and you can ten send a direct message to anyone, which will be seen by them only

Conclusion Of course there is a lot more to twitter than what I’ve included here, but I hope you’ve learned something today! Happy Tweeting.