Twitter Power 3.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time

3Getting Started the Right Way on Twitter

A large part of Twitter's beauty is its simplicity. Sign up for many of the other social networking sites, and you'll be asked questions about your life that cover everything ranging from where you went to school to your favorite band or old TV show.

On Twitter, people are happy to let everyone know what they had for lunch (as well as breakfast, supper, brunch, and afternoon snack and what they dunked in their coffee), but that's not because Twitter asks them to.

In fact, the site keeps everything very clean and easy to use.

In this chapter, we're going to help you get to grips with the basics of Twitter. It's not difficult to understand, but you will need to know the way the site works and how to use it. We'll explain what happens during registration, what followers and tweets are, and how to send and receive those all-important messages.

Signing Up—Does Twitter Have the Web's Most Friendly Registration Page?

At some point, all Internet entrepreneurs face a dilemma. They look at Google's home page with its white space and single-line search box, and they realize that simple is good.

Then they look at the list of all the features they want their site to include, and they stuff their home page and their registration page—and every other page—with features and information that only a fraction of their users will want and only a few people will ever use.

It's just too tempting, and it's a mistake that gums up the works of businesses as ...