Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [5]
Just ask Laura. Before she “got” Twitter, she was practically homebound with two kids under two, trying to rebuild her personal and professional network in a whole new city. Twitter has been like a generous ocean. Treasured new friends, mentors, and incredible opportunities continually wash up on her beach. After 12 months of meeting incredible people and all her business leads, along with speaking at events all around the world, Laura finally took the hint and refocused her entire career on Twitter itself, to help others experience the benefits of mobile social networking. This year, her Christmas and birthday wish — to raise $25,000 for charity: water to build wells in developing nations — came true, you guessed it, because of Twitter.
Conventions Used in This Book
In this book, we stick to a few conventions to help with readability. Whenever you have to enter text, we show it in bold, so you can easily see it. Monofont text denotes an e-mail address or Web site URL. We capitalize the names of Twitter pages and features — such as Settings. Numbered lists guide you through tasks that you must complete in order, from top to bottom; you can read bulleted lists in any order you like (from top to bottom, bottom to top, or any other way).
Note: Screenshots in this book show you what the interface was like in spring 2009, and significant changes took place four times during the writing of this book. If you ever run into Michael and he looks kind of nervous when you talk about the Twitter interface, it’s because he had to go back and change so many descriptions and screenshots over and over again. Give him a hug for us, please?
What You’re Not to Read
We wrote this book for the first-time Twitter users. If you’ve already created an account that has some friends and followers, you can probably skip the chapters that talk about how to sign up and get moving — but you might find it useful to review the sections on how to dress up your profile. If you’re a business and have already gotten rolling on Twitter, you can probably safely ignore many of the starting chapters and check out Parts III and IV. If you’re a Twitter pro and could have probably written this book, feel free not to read anything, use this book as a doorstop, and recycle it when you’re done. Okay, we’re kidding — it’ll make a great gift for the Twitter-skeptics in your life!
Foolish Assumptions
In this book, we make the following assumptions:
You’re at least 13 years of age. (You have to be at least 13 years old to have a Twitter account.)
You have access to a computer and the Internet (and know how to use them!).
You have a working e-mail address that you can access.
You have a mobile phone and know how to send text messages (if you want to access Twitter by using your mobile phone).
Bonus: You have a smartphone (if you want to use a mobile Twitter application).
You can read.
How This Book Is Organized
Like other For Dummies books, each chapter in Twitter For Dummies is self-contained, and you can read them in any order you want. However, we’ve organized the book into four parts, and if you read them in order, you can get a strong understanding of the Twitter landscape, from signing up to tweeting like a pro.
Part I: Twitter? Like Birds Do?
Part I introduces you to the very basics of Twitter, from understanding how the Twitter feeds work to getting up and running with an account. You can figure out how to find and invite your friends to Twitter and start communicating with them in public and in private. We also look at the different things that you can do with the Twitter.com interface, including some things that may not be immediately obvious.
Part II: Joining Your Flock on Twitter
After you become familiar with the basics of Twitter, you probably want to know how to find the sorts of people you want to follow and how you can start communicating