By now if you haven’t heard of Twitter then where the hell have you been?! It’s the latest in social networking. It’s simple, you’ micro blog’ any little or big thing you have to say (that’s interesting). Dope right? Yay and nay, there are loads of people out there who I’m following who have really great and interesting things to say, some however don’t and the term twat is frequently used. Here are 7 golden rules to fool proof you from being a Twitter twat.

140 characters; use them wisely! The first thing you need to know about Twitter is that you can only post a message of 140 characters at a time, so use them wisely. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve seen posts of ‘…’ or when someone has clearly written something too long to post so spread it over 5 or 6 posts. Its Twitter, not an online novel! Use the 140 wisely and the world will follow you.

Decide if you actually want a Twitter account beforehand. Twitter is something that constantly needs to be updated, it’s the most real time news medium on the internet today, you can update it from your computer or your phone leaving you with no excuse not to be tweeting. Decide whether you want to make this commitment to the cyber world before as seeing someone’s last tweet dated as 2 years ago is just plain crap.

Avoid using the word ‘Porn’. It may sound funny but seriously guys try to avoid using words such as ‘porn’ or ‘sex’ or ‘c***’ I think I used the word porn once and within the hour I had the Twitter pages of 6 porn sites following me! I can’t show that to my mum!

Don’t just post a link, EXPLAIN IT! Seeing just a link is like playing Russian roulette, it could be porn, or some animal love website or a virus or even just a boy band fan page! It’s my rule of thumb never just to click a link unless there’s some sort of decent description. Seriously I learnt the hard way, I clicked a link once and now I’m a member of monkey-love.com, could have been worse I suppose…

Avoid using too many capital letters. People who use too many capital letters in their tweets seem like they’re shouting and people who are too shouty rarely have interesting things to say. (Ignore me using all caps when I wrote explain it on the point before)

Retweet frequently not obsessively. A good retweet is dope, it allows others to see something interesting you may have come across or the chance to laugh at a funny joke we haven’t heard in a couple hours but beware the sin of obsessive retweeting. People who simply retweet over and over again are boring and in real life are known as smelly-welly copy cats. Be individual and unique with your tweets.

Don’t just tweet the most random thing on your mind. Finally please think about what you say on Twitter, neither I nor anyone else wants to know your cat is currently licking itself somewhere where it shouldn’t, save that for your Facebook status.

My friends these are the golden rules of Twitter. Live long and prosper

Da Vinci