The best way to get started harnessing the power of Twitter is to just jump in with both feet by creating an account and starting to tweet!  A twitter account will only take you a few minutes to create and you’ll be addicted in about 15 minutes afterward.

The main Twitter page is certainly not confusing or difficult to navigate. Simply go to Twitter.com and you will see a page that looks like this:

Click the green button that reads “Get Started – Join”, and you will be taken to very basic registration form that looks like this:

Choosing your username:

Give some thought to your username if you’re using it to represent yourself as a person, or a marketer, and not just your website. This is the name people will know you by, so try to find an available name that suits you, and not just a name like “twit579J” that would look like a spammer’s account.

You are able to choose a name that i a maximum of 15 characters (without spaces) so you need to use that limit wisely. If you want to choose a name that directly promotes your business, that’s acceptable, but having a sort of personal touch seems to work better on the big scheme of things.  The key to all this is the “being social” part, and in most cases, a more personal name will seem more genuine.

Other Settings:

Once you’re finished creating a username for your account, you’ll be taken to a screen that auto-suggests some followers for you. You can quickly glance through these or you can simply skip this step and be taken right to your new account home page.

That was basically it. No sweat, right?

Now, you’ll have a page that asks you the infamous “What are you doing?”.

However, don’t forget that, unless someone happens to stumble across your account, nobody is going to see you until you have followers so you might want to add a tweet or two and then head off to find some people you’d be interested in and choose to follow them by clicking the “follow button” at the top of their page.

Customize And Personalize Your Account:

You still have some settings in the backend of your Twitter account that looks like this:

From here, you can choose to set a couple notification preferences (such as mobile communication via Twitter), add a short bio, and customize your Twitter page a little bit visually (which is highly recommended).

Twitter has some built-in designs for the background of your page under the “design” tab, but you also have the option of uploading your own custom image to be used as a background as well!

That’s it! Now that you have an account, start tweeting and networking in!