Twitter is not just for teens and twenties: In February 2009, adults ages 35-49 had the largest representation on Twitter - almost 3 million unique visitors from this age group (almost 42% of the entire audience).

Your Profile:

After the sign up, the best thing you can do is tell people about yourself - add a picture, link to your page or Website. People decide who to follow or who not to follow based on what they see in the profile, provide them with plenty of information.

Follows and Following

People use Twitter for many different reasons - business promotion, shop talk, news, debate, to pass on jokes or just pass the time.

You don’t have to follow everyone who’s following you.

Don't expect everyone you follow, to follow you in turn.

If some of your followers are spammers, you can report them by forwarding their Twitter user name to @spam.

Applications available for Twitter

Destroy Twitter is a robust but compact Twitter application built to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux using Adobe AIR.

Sideline is an Adobe Air Twitter app. from Yahoo which monitors the Twitter public timeline in real time.

With TweetDeck you can follow your friends on Twitter, update your own account and organize information in a more comfortable way. You can group those you follow under different headings.

Twitter Local is an Adobe AIR based application that allows you to filter Tweets by location. e.g. Location London, England within 50 miles.

TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter. You can login to Twitpic with your Twitter username and password.

Twitter add-ons for FireFox

Power Twitter adds many features to the Twitter Web interface e.g. inline YouTube, Flickr, TwitPic, Google Maps, song.ly, etc.

Twitbin is a firefox extension that allows you to keep up with all of your Twitter conversations from your browser sidebar.

TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends' status on Twitter and [pops up as a small box in the lower right hand corner of the screen.

Many more Twitter Tools can be found at Twitter Toolbox

Learn the jargon:

Twitterers, Tweeties, Tweeple or Tweeps (Twits? Tweeters?) post tweets!

• A DM is a direct message seen only by the recipient. You may only send messages to people who are following you - this is a Twitter policy.

• An @replies (@name) is a message you send to a specific person which everyone else on Twitter can see.

• Hash Tags (#tags): To track tweets using search.twitter.com e.g. #boatrace would find all tweets marked with boatrace.

• Re-Tweet (RT). If you think that someone’s tweet is profound, amusing or remarkable, you would retweet it to share it with your followers.

What are you doing?

Don't write that you are having breakfast unless it's something very special. Whatever you write, try to make it interesting but remember you only have up to 140 characters to do it.

You can post URL's but often they need to be shortened. Tinyurl.com can be used for this if you are not using Power Twitter.

Interesting Tweets to follow

Jodrell Bank - 257,733 Followers

Downing Street - 344,620 Followers

BBCClick - 331,222 Followers

bbccouk - 1,003 Followers