What is a Tweet?
A Tweet is a posting made on the social media site Twitter.
Twitter is a popular online social networking site used for microblogging through the use of Tweets, which are text-based messages with a maximum of 280 characters. While registered Twitter users can send and read Tweets, unregistered users can only read them.
To join Twitter, go to www.twitter.com. You'll need to provide your first and last name, email, and choose a "handle" or username which is used by Twitter to identify you in your Tweets.
Other registered users can respond to Tweets by replying to the original posting. Allowing unregistered users to read a Tweet is part of what makes Twitter such a powerful social media tool. The registered user's message can easily reach hundreds or thousands of people. Tweets range from silly and mundane to profound and powerful, and can carry a lot of weight in today's world of real-time posting.
Why 280 characters?
When Twitter was created, the limit on text messages was 160 characters. A Tweet was limited to 140 characters because a text message can be sent with up to 160 characters, and the site reserves 20 characters for displaying the user's Twitter account name. Once a user has signed up on Twitter, they can follow the Tweets of people they'd like to hear from, and others can follow the user's original Tweets. With most Twitter accounts using smartphones, Twitter changed the character limit to 280 characters and now allows a photo or short video.
How to say more in 280 characters
It's possible to use the 280 characters for any combination of letters, numbers, and symbols, which allows Tweets to include links to web sites in the message. Web services offer the ability to take a long web site address and shorten it, like creating a code, so the link to the web site can fit into fewer characters. Let's look at an example so you'll be able to recognize a short link.
Here's an example of a newsletter page link for my newsletter on What is a Semiconductor?
//www.bobology.com/public/What-is-a-Semiconductor.cfm
This link has over 50 characters, which would use up a substantial number of the 140 characters available in a Tweet. Using a service that shortens web addresses, the link to the web page in the Tweet is shortened to dlvr.it/4fk3HR, which is only 15 characters.
By using short web links, users of Twitter can say more in a Tweet than what 140 characters might allow them to say. Adding a web address link in the Tweet leads to more information such as a web page, photo, or video when a user clicks on the link contained in the Tweet. Of course, users can also use a full web address in a Tweet, it's just become a practice to use short ones.
Web sites that offer free web address shortening services include: tiny.url, ow.ly, bitly.com, and www.goo.gl (offered by Google). Just copy and paste a long web address and the sites create a short one for you to use in Tweets, emails, and more.
Why Tweets travel widely
While Tweets are defaulted as public, meaning anyone can view them, there is a privacy setting that allows users to approve all followers and limit the viewing of Tweets to followers only. Users can also choose to “Retweet”, or repost someone else's Tweet. These Retweets are usually indicated as such by using the letters RT and the original poster's Twitter account name along with the message.
While the first Tweet was posted on March 21, 2006, its popularity grew exponentially within the age of social media and networking. An estimated 500 million Tweets are sent each day, and roughly 75% of those come from users on a mobile smartphone. That number may seem surprising, but with over 230 million active users each month and many users who post several Tweets each day, it's easy to see how that number is reached. Twitter supports over 35 languages and a whopping 77% of its user accounts are based outside of the United States.
Impact of Tweets
The use of Tweets has changed not only the social lives of teens and young adults but is known for changing the face of political communication. Now everyone from President Obama (with over 25 million followers) to your average citizen can share their opinion of political happenings, and it has created a new era of what is known as citizen journalists. Businesses have even benefited from Twitter through access to target markets via smartphones and the internet.
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