HOW TO USE:TWITTER

 How To Use Twitter: Critical Tips For New Users

Twitter is where news is broken, links are shared, and memes are born. It's also a place for chatting with friends. Yet unlike Facebook, Twitter is public by default. And that's not a bad thing. It means your jokes can go viral (if they're funny) and in addition to your friends, you can interact with your favorite journalists, athletes, artists, or political figures, all in the same space.

How to Make a Twitter Account on Mobile

Step 1: Fill out your name and phone number/email address. Make sure to use your real one as the next step will ask you to verify.

Step 2: Enter in the verification number that you received at whatever contact information you put in in 

Step 3: Choose whether you'd like to sync your contacts. This may help you find Twitter followers you know, but if you don't want to, just hit "not now."

Step 4: Search for interests. This will help Twitter recommend good profiles for you to follow.

Step 5: Twitter will provide you with some accounts you can follow based on your interests. Pick out a few you like. If you see them to start you feed off on the right foot.

Step 6: You're in! Simply click on the blue button on the top right to tweet, the grey silhouette on the top left to change your profile picture and settings, and get tweeting!

How to Search on Twitter

Twitter isn't about friending—it's about following. You can follow people you know personally, or artists or projects you're a fan of. You can follow robots and parody accounts. Really, you can do whatever you like.

Your First Tweet

Before you start firing off tweets, it might help to know a little about the mechanics.

Step 1: All tweets are a maximum of 280 characters. While that might seem too short to say anything substantive, it's not. It might mean having to tweet multiple times to make a complex point (in the Twittersphere, we call that a thread), but boiling down your thoughts to a couple of lines really just makes your statement stronger, faster to read, and more shareable.

Step 2: Speaking of a Twitter thread, if you have more than 280 characters to say about a subject they are easy to make. Just type your first tweet using the "Tweet" button, and hit the   button on the bottom right. This will string together a series of tweets where you can make a larger point.

Step 3: If you want to add a photo, a video, a poll, or a gif, you can do so in the lower bar of the "Compose new Tweet" box. Adding a photo does not use up any of your 280 characters, and you can add up to four photos or a video less than 2:20 in length and 500mb in size.

Step 4: Sharing a link your Tweet will decrease your character count by 23 characters. Pro tip: Leave a space between your text and the link. Otherwise it may include the entirety of the link in your character count.

Step 5: Hashtags are best used for adding to a larger conversation, and the most popular ones show up on the left side of the "Home" tab. Hashtags are clickable, too, so you can tap on a hashtag to see all the tweets related to that topic.