What do you use Twitter for?

Quetius Blog

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social network created in 2006. Last year, it got up to 500 million users around all the world. The greatest difference from other social networks is that you can only write up to 140 characters in each post. Posts are called "tweets", which is the sound birds make in English. You can also find information and tweets by people you do not follow if you use "hashtags", that is, the symbol # followed by a word or sentence usually not separated (you only have 140 characters and you do not want to waste any on spaces!)

What are Twitter's main services?

There are many uses for this social network; the main one, is microblogging, that is, you tell your "followers" (people that have pushed a "follow" button on your profile because they want to know what you "tweet") what you are doing while you are doing it (present continuous is pretty used is this service)..

There are lists of up to a hundred uses of Twitter in the internet, taking one of them, we find that it is mainly used for finding quick answers, finding a job, keeping up with the news, arranging meetings with friends, to express anger against any issue, to find out what people really think of the latest movie or book and also for fun and games.

What do I use it for?

I have been in Twitter for only two months or so now, I was afraid I would have to be all day long taking care of it and I resisted myself to register, but I must say, I am really happy I did. My top 5 uses' list:

1. Share articles and my own posts from this blog.
2. Keep up with news (especially educative ones)
3. Learn from people in a professional way.
4. Be in contact with my students.
5. Create a professional network.

I have found this social network very rewarding both professionally and personally; for instance, yesterday one of my students created the hashtag #APorEl3Puesto, to help me win at the Love English Awards contest by the MacMillan Dictionary Blog (if you want to vote, it only takes a few seconds and no data is required from you). I was quite moved.

What do you use it for?