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Step By Step Guide For Parents Using Twitter

Getting Started With Twitter by SoftwareGuru Tuesday 21st April 2009 Software4Students has joined Twitter so this week we'll take a look at how to set up an account which will provide you will useful information. For starters, Channel 4 News have created a quick video tutorial which walks you through the whole set up process. Take a look at that if you prefer a visual guide. As with all social media sites from Bebo to Facebook, setting up a Twitter account is very straightforward. 1. Go to Twitter.com 2. Click Button 'Get Started - Join' 3. Create Account by typing in your: - Full Name - Username (on-screen when you post a message) - Create your password - Enter your email address (for notifications) - Enter Security Text (repeat text shown on-screen) 4. Now click 'Create My Account' button. Once created you have simple design options under the 'Settings' menu such as choose your background colour or image. It literally will take you one minute to set up. Once the free account is created, the next question is "how do I use Twitter?"
	Using Twitter Firstly, if you don't want the whole world to see your updates and would prefer to be selective about access (ie. only friends and family), click 'Settings' and then tick the 'Protect My Updates' tickbox at the bottom of the page, then 'Save'. Click 'Find People' to search for conversation topics you are interested in. In Twitter, you could search for a person such as newsreader 'Jon Snow' or you could search for tagged topics which look like this: #student #studentnews You can read more about tags here. After you've chosen a few people to follow (ie. read their posts or tweets) you're ready to send your own first tweet. Before we cover that, a reminder that Twitter advises you to follow no more than 1,000 users. Whether this will change or have a negative impact on your account remains to be seen. Twitter states: "While there are technical reasons behind having some limit on following activites, this per-day limit exists to discourage spamminess. Also, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes the mass following activity disingenuous." And believe me when I say that there are a lot of spammers out there in Twitter. Your privacy should be maintained at all times so don't be afraid to protect it.
Avoid Spam, Ads and Noise Sending your first tweet is as easy as sending an email, except this message, called a tweet, can only be 140 characters long. On the twitter.com/home screen, under 'What Are You Doing' you can type your tweet into the box and click update. If you wish to include a link you will need to shorten the URL so it uses less characters. There are many sites that will do this for you for free. There are also guides to Twitter tips and tricks which can help. If you start to attract followers (people following your updates) do not feel that you must follow them in return. Be on the look out for spammers and don't follow accounts that have no tweets in them. Be selective. For example, if your interests are food and gardening then stick to following people who tweet about those topics: http://twitter.com/gardennetwork Block anyone who is the online Twitter equivalent of junk mail. UK firms certainly have a lot to learn. Finally, with people all over the world joining Twitter at an incredibly fast rate, don't be surprised if you encounter the odd problem with the site. If you do see the whale error screen, best thing to do it leave it for a minute and return to the site later. Have fun! Wikipedia info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter S4S on Twitter: http://twitter.com/studentsoftware

Parents and Guardians can follow S4S updates on Twitter.

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