With more than 100 million registered users and 50 million daily tweets, Twitter has become one of the most popular social networking sites.
The site is growing at a tremendous speed, with 300,000 new users signing up per day.
If you're one of these new users, you may find yourself overwhelmed trying to get a hold of how to navigate the site.
Here are some tips to help you get started and use Twitter to its full potential.
Important Terms in Twitter lingo: username: an update sent to a specific user.
Also called Replies or Mentions.
Replies to you are viewed on your homepage.
hashtags: A way to tag your update on a specific subject.
Followers and non-followers can find your update using the Twitter search box.
followfriday: One of the most popular hashtags.
Follow Friday is when you recommend users to all of your followers by including username and followfriday in the same tweet.
If you want to recommend lots of users, put username1 and username2 plus followfriday.
URL Shorteners You will often see Twitter updates that start off with links such as bit.
ly.
These are websites that turn your long URL into a short one.
When you only have 140 characters per update, you do not want to take up more room than necessary with your URL.
The Bookmarklet When you are on a page for which you would like to shorted the URL for and send on Twitter, click the Bit.
ly link on your toolbar.
In order to do so, drag the bookmarklet to the browser's bookmark toolbar.
Another window/tab will open with the shortened URL of the page you selected.
The Stats If you share links via your Twitter posts, you will like the statistics feature.
When you shorten your URLs, Bit.
ly will show a history.
If you click Info, you will see the number of clicks the URL has received, as well as additional Bit.
ly links that were created for your article.
If you click View All by conversations, you will see all the other Twitter updates with the same URL.