We begin our social media series on Twitter, one of the most powerful forms of social media. Twitter is fast, easy to use, spreads like wildfire and is huge for crowd sourcing- the ultimate goal of most social media campaigns. It has saved lives, brought down empires and politicians, important tool in emergencies and a source for breaking news for many.

Twitter: The Basics

Twitter is a microblogging platform that gives short near real time or real time results for communication. While this usually consists of typed text, it can also be done via phone.

Here are some basic lengths and sizes for posts, names and images.

Post Length-Tweet

Tweets are individual posts. These are no longer 140 characters in length. This includes spaces. To compensate for this, many abbreviations have become common place such as “U” for “you” and “4” for “for”.

Twitter Name Length

15 characters is the limit for the name length on Twitter.

Bio Length

You get 160 characters for the bio.

Profile Image

81×81 pixels

Header Image

520 x 260 pixels

Background Image

The total background image, which is partially covered is 1280 x 1924 pixels.

Instead of one image, a repeating image can be used. We will cover this more later.

The next part of our series will talk about how to set up and use Twitter.

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