Twitter is here to stay. It is the fastest growing website on the planet. In less than a year it has added 35 million new members. The sooner YOU get on twitter, the sooner you'll get up to speed, if you are not on it yet.

Twitter is evolving to become a powerful tool, as its' inventor says, "a utility." Already, some jobs are REQUIRING that you have X number of followers (300 in one case) as a job pre-requisite. It's not unreasonable to expect employers to start asking "how long have you been on twitter?"

With 35 million users, a lot of the best user names are already taken. You want to get on so you can get a name you want, preferably your own name.

Twitter is a lot of fun and a powerful source of information that's not that hard to use.

You'll want to understand a few twitter concepts to maximize your experience, reach and number of followers:
URL Shorteners turns a long URL into a much shorter one.
hashtags #tag add these to get a lot more views of your post by people searching for the tags or routinely tracking them.
re-tweeting re-send other people's tweets to your followers and the hashtag groups you want to reach.


We've added a number of features on OpEdNews.com that make it easy to "tweet" articles, to follow twitter users. That puts us ahead of most sites, including the NY times, and puts us even with huffingtonpost. Please get signed up with twitter if you are not already and add your twitter user information to your member info. Then, start using twitter to tweet articles. The way you build your follower base is to include hashtags with your tweets. This drastically increases the number of people who see your tweets. Some of the most common hashtags in use include:
#TCOT top conservatives on twitter
#TLOT top libertarians on twitter
#P2 progressives
#topprog top progressives on twitter

There are many more. Start doing searches for keywords and find the related hashtags to use with your tweets.
I started doing this and increased my followers by over 100 in less than 2 weeks.

Also, OpEdNEws has created a new content category and column produced from tweets. Look at the new tweet column, beow the diaries column and start commenting in response to tweets. You don't have to be on twitter to do that.