Getting started with twitter is like walking into a jungle of conversations. Here are four main tips that can help you in the rain forest of information exchange.

Twitter is a social media site for filtering information and interacting with like-minded people you may or may not know. If you are new to it, are skeptical about it, or just want to weigh more facts and opinions there are some things you may want to consider to help get you started.

Twitter is an interactive site. It’s more than announcing to no one in particular that you are hungry or tired. In fact, those tweets are boring and ignored. Your twitter interaction needs to be just that—an interaction. There are four main ways to interact on Twitter.

• @name. When you mention someone by putting the @ sign in front of their twitter name, it will show up on your twitter thread, but they will also see it. So, it’s a public interaction. Singling someone out but everyone can still see what you are talking about. It’s important to be genuine and courteous when mentioning another user this way.

• #topic. If you want to see who is talking about, say the world cup. You can search in the search bar to the right “#worldcup”. This acts as an aggregator to everyone who is talking about that topic and tagging it in their tweet with the pound sign. Keep it short and one word, even if it’s several words mashed together, i.e. #WishYouWereHere. You can see on the right bar what popular “conversations” people are having all over the Twitterverse.

• Direct Message or DM is a good tool to say something to @someone without everyone else feeling like they are eavesdropping on your conversation. The catch is that DMs only work if both parties follow each other.

• Posting links. With the prohibitive nature of a 140-character allowance per tweet, the most effective way to share information is to post a hyperlink. Briefly introduce what the link is about and insert the link. If the link is too long, you can shorten it at www.bit.ly.

The appeal is that you become a source of information for those that follow you. And you get an aggregation of information personally customized to your interests because it’s from people you follow.  It’s the information age and part of living in it is tweeting in it.

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