What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking website that's designed for finding and sharing short update s. In fact, each post—or tweet as they're called on Twitter—is limited to just 280 individual characters (letters, spaces, and punctuation marks). That's not even long enough to include the first two sentences of this paragraph! Take a look at the tweet we've embedded below:

Hello Twitter! #myfirstTweet
— Bill Fisher (@LearnFreeBill) September 15, 2015

Tweets are so short that you might wonder why people bother posting them in the first place. But that's actually a big part of what makes Twitter so popular: It's easy to quickly share what's happening in your world or follow along with a popular topic in real time.

Water! Strong evidence that liquid water flows on present-day Mars. Details: http://t.co/0MW11SANwL #MarsAnnouncement pic.twitter.com/JNksawz2iN
— NASA (@NASA) September 28, 2015

Watch the video below to learn more about Twitter and how it works:

About this tutorial

Because Twitter is focused on short, real-time updates, it's primarily used on mobile devices. As a result, this tutorial will mainly focus how to use Twitter from a smartphone . However, if you're using Twitter on a laptop or desktop computer, you can still follow along—Twitter works just about the same on any device, and we'll be careful to point out any major differences.