I signed up for a Twitter account just over two weeks ago and am was initially a bit unsure about how to go forward with this massively popular social networking website. Twitter is very straight forward to use - a 140 character limit answer to ‘What are you doing?’ leaves no room for ‘beating around the bush’ and posts need to be brief whilst at the same time getting your message over.

Within a few hours of signing up to I was surprised to find that I had a follower. I didn’t do anything about this though and the follower had disappeared the next day. A quick check of Twitter etiquette told me what should have been obvious; if anybody starts following you then you should return the compliment and start following them, which is what I started doing. I now have a small group of ‘followers’ and, of course, have a similarly sized small group of people I am following.

But where does all this lead to? I started following a group of IM experts, since I felt it would be enlightening to read their posts, and a couple of these people have returned the compliment. However, I kept getting notifications that seemingly random people were following me, I returned the compliment, and so it went on. Then I came across a couple of free guides on basic and more advanced Twittering and things suddenly made a lot more sense. You can get the guides here in exchange for your name and email address, and you can follow me on Twitter here.