Vanessa Doctor

Retweets are a quick and easy way to forward information to your followers without having to type a message from scratch.

A large Twitter following completes the micro-blogging experience. For your posts to make a difference, they need to reach a lot of people.

Protected tweets allow you to control who views your posts.

Replies and Mentions are the best and most visible way to reach out to your followers on Twitter. Maximizing their use ensures a large following and a highly-respected Twitter presence.

Knowing the basic Twitter jargon will make for a seamless micro-blogging experience.

URL shorteners are great tools to make more space for personalization on your tweets.

Twitter may be public domain, but to thrive and survive, you need to follow a few basic best practices guidelines.

A direct message, a DM for short, is a post sent privately to another Twitter user while signed on to the platform.

Your Twitter username is your identifier within the micro-blogging community. To get started, you will need to create a unique username.

A trend on Twitter refers to a hashtag-driven topic that is immediately popular at a particular time. Trends are often created to promote a cause, an event or simply to build a massive online discussion about a subject.

Hashtags have been a popular and effective way to bring ideas together from people all over the world -- and a solid technique for marketers to reach their target consumers.

Not all characters are acceptable for use with hashtags. Here's what works and what doesn't.

A tweet chat, sometimes called a Twitter party, refers to the collective use of a specific hashtag within a specified time, mostly with the goal to promote an event or move a cause forward.

Faith is such a strong force to bring people together -- and for the church, one surefire way to get people involved in a cause is to reach out through social media.

Twitter is gearing up for a strong Latin American presence by setting up a sales office in Brazil.

The demand for a hot social media photo has spurred a growing trend for plastic surgery aimed solely at creating attractive online profiles.

Nowadays, job hunting is also largely about WHO you know, at least online.

Twitter goes beyond 140 characters and into live reality TV.

Olympics officials tell Twitter users to control activity, or face coverage delays.

The world's most powerful take their thoughts to Twitter.

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper's admission of homosexuality sparks mixed reactions from public.

Financial services industry opens up to social media posting to disseminate information faster

National governments see potential in Twitter to help stop shady cross-border financial deals.