...tell people on here what your Twitter account is called. Then they came.

By the way, I also changed my mind on Ben Goldacre completely after following him on Twitter.

I use my account for work, follow others in my line of work and acquire followers that way. I still get random followers - why on earth a coffee shop in Cincinnati is interested in UK HR and Employment Law I have no idea, but they follow me.

Follow a few people yourself, get yourself listed on various twitter lists and use hashtags (e.g. #wordmagazine) - in that example people looking for "word magazine" will find your tweets and perhaps follow you. Look at the "trending topics" and if you can find a relevant one use it as a hashtag for your tweet

I'm on there (@BluePaul), as are many others (who are relatively easy to find as there tends to be a lot of username synergy). Various members of The Management are on there as well.

You already know what to expect of this community - twitter is the same, if a little more 'real-time'.

From there, you'll soon find out who else is worth following - difficult for me to advise because the sort of people I like following might be complete anathema to you!

What's your username? I'll follow you :) I think my only followers are Massive Members, but I mainly just enjoy following rather than being followed.

Also, I find Twitter a bit more natural, like a proper conversation. The 140 characters thing is a blessing for the likes of me: less chance of overwriting my welcome.

1. Follow people (which you've already done)
2. Interact. Retweet other people's nuggets; the Tweeter will see that you've shared their words and may well see you are a person of note and follow you. Similarly, comment on what people say - engage in dialogue. Some may answer back and then follow you.
3. Write witty and/or informative Tweets. As ever, content is king. I'll keep coming back if you are saying things of interest. There the lazy old critique of Twitter (and indeed social media in general) that it's people telling the world about their lunchtime sandwich. Yes, people do this, but the ones to keep following are the ones who say something interesting or devastatingly witty about the sandwich.

(4. Tell us your Twitter name. I'm sure plenty of Word Tweeters will follow you! I'm @endaguinan )

A friend of mine is @2010misterchip who has well in excess of 50,000 followers. His feed is mainly in Spanish and he tweets all sorts of stuff including football stats and general sports banter. My own feed has nothing on it for months and otherwise is banal in the extreme. I have 31 followers.

I think I just did the blog equivalent of wailing 'won't someone be my friend' in a crowded room. Which was not the intention. Rest assured, I am relatively social in my real life incarnation; I'm only an electronic outcast!

Anyway, for those who want to know, I'm @richandstrange

Though my feed isn't exactly thrilling currently. There's a kind of chicken and egg thing going on though - I don't feel I have much of interest to say if there is noone to say it to. Anyway, I shall now follow some Massive Members.

@ainsley001

I'm going to follow you all now but I'll drop you like a hot potato if you fail to interest me... (chortle)

@ganglesprocket is mine. I write hilarious* things when drunk.
*mortifying

I started tweeting on behalf of the company (@reddogdublin) I work for last June. It took a while to gather up any number of followers (after all, who wants to follow the ramblings from a design studio?) which can make you feel like nobody's listening and leaves the tweeter with a bit of a "what's the point?" feeling.

However I stuck at it and now, 7 or 8 months later, we've got a healthy number of followers and get to engage in some interesting topics most days. It's not bad for business either when our clients see that we're part of something that's perceived to be a bit 'now'. Unfortunately, since I'm not speaking for myself and representing my employer, I have to censor myself a little. In a way I prefer that - it makes me think a little harder about what I'm saying and its relevance.

Apart from today when I've been too busy to even look at twitter.

I like the immediacy of twitter. Some times, like when our government went into freefall this week, it really feels like you're part of a large community of like minded tweeters. When you consider how many news stories are breaking on twittter, I definitely think it's here to stay. Not sure if the revolution will be tweeted but I'm not sure that that's the point of it..

Anyway, if you want to follow us, you can do so at twitter.com/reddogdublin

It's not all about paper samples and photoshop!

I started tweeting on behalf of the company (@reddogdublin) I work for last June. It took a while to gather up any number of followers (after all, who wants to follow the ramblings from a design studio?) which can make you feel like nobody's listening and leaves the tweeter with a bit of a "what's the point?" feeling.

However I stuck at it and now, 7 or 8 months later, we've got a healthy number of followers and get to engage in some interesting topics most days. It's not bad for business either when our clients see that we're part of something that's perceived to be a bit 'now'. Unfortunately, since I'm not speaking for myself and representing my employer, I have to censor myself a little. In a way I prefer that - it makes me think a little harder about what I'm saying and its relevance.

Apart from today when I've been too busy to even look at twitter.

I like the immediacy of twitter. Some times, like when our government went into freefall this week, it really feels like you're part of a large community of like minded tweeters. When you consider how many news stories are breaking on twittter, I definitely think it's here to stay. Not sure if the revolution will be tweeted but I'm not sure that that's the point of it..

Anyway, if you want to follow us, you can do so at twitter.com/reddogdublin

It's not all about paper samples and photoshop!

Sorry - don't know how that happened. It wouldn't happen on twitter!

The only thing I currently tweet are my weekly listening habits through last.fm but maybe that will change

The Massive on Twitter are as wonderful as they are on here only condensed.I often find it highly amusing the seemingly random followers that choose to follow my mind numbingly dull rambles interspersed with postings of my paintings and drawings. I do love a good hashtag game though.

Please follow and I will do the same!
I really like Twitter, but none of my human friends seems to want to get involved.

Proudly one of the Massive. I tweet excitedly about Jenny Agutter when Logan's Run is on Channel 5.

if you want to know what's going on in the world of HR and employment law, I'm your man. I don't tweet about much else, so if you want to know whether I think Sgt Pepper or Music From Big Pink is more influential you're more likely to find it here!

Is there any way of creating a Twitter 'group'? If I want to reply to a thread that three or four people are involved in, I find myself left with about three characters to get my point across.

So can you effectively go '@youtwo' or '@youlot' or is the etiquette just to reply to one or two and hope everyone else gets the message?

This applies particularly if I'm conversing with just 2, 3 or 4 people, not the whole Massive, so '@WordMassive' wouldn't really give me what I want...

Give this a look, too:

http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/lets-tweet-again

...apart from Tone Hannan, author of the definitive Eddie Waring biography, but I enjoy the mix of one-liners on my feed - from Drakey's always-funny Woke Up This Morning tweets to John Shuttleworth's oiling hinges ones. I also like the varied glimpses into people's lives from Word-ites and others, the music recommendations, the alerts to big news stories from Glinner, Hari etc, and news from my local boozers.

You don't necessarily get more followers if you tweet and I don't think about who I'm tweeting to - I like the discipline of trying to write something interesting and/or funny concisely (although I usually write a load of old cobblers when I'm half-cut in a pub or bored on a bus)

I have followed random tweeters when I feel they've got something in common with me from their bios or tweets, so I'd say go for it Uncle. If you can write something on here don't be bashful about tweeting.

Getting in to Twitter has been made a lot easier thanks to the Massive, many of whom have been kind enough to follow me. And from this thread I've found a few more !

You could try #followfriday tomorrow - tweet the twitter names of all the people you think are interesting enough to follow with the #followfriday or #ff hashtag. It will show up in their list of tweets which have been directed at them, and you'll probably get a few follows from that too.

"White population in Abyssinia" might be "in great danger" if anti-Italian revolt spreads. Eden to watch situation - via @ukwarcabinet

@funkygibbondave is my confusing moniker

It's basically just like blogging on here, just extremely abbreviated

is me...i mostly read not tweet but do more frequently use it..the ipad and iphone apps are very well designed, I make a lot of use of the 'starred' function for particular tweets and related links when I have full use of computer. I also scan others' 'followed' for further new sources.

I did start a similar post on this a few months back, http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/twitterati, that may have some stuff of use

It appears I was showing Massive apathy and not following a few of you. I hope this is corrected now.

That underscore is key - the one without the underscore is even duller than me.

I have added a few that I have missed in the past from here. Consider yourselves followed.

PS - Drakeygirl's woke up this morning's are great. Enough of a reason for the invention of twitter.

Apologies of you see me following you know, I may not be that interesting, but I don't unfollow often. That has to count for something, right?

Drakeygirl should damn well put these in a book.

is me. Lots of wittering, piffle and pictures of biscuits. Really.

but is twittering restricted to mobile phones? I thought it was a sort of texty thing.

The new Twitter app for Mac has replaced the very busy and annoyingly shaded Tweetdeck for me. Yes, you can use it at home. But it's much much less easy to justify.

... to do is Twitter.

That may be over-selling it a touch, but I like it... (now that's probably under-selling it)

And since you asked, I'm @MrRenoDakota

I love Twitter. And when I first heard about it I thought I'd hate it. I've unfollowed a few people, either for being completely dull or for being overly solipsistic. A few people have unfollowed me. Nobody died.

I'm @rosbif65.

I've been twitter lurker for little while now, with three truly tedious tweets to my name. Including one to David Hepworth that contained a mistake. He was good enough not to point it out. I'll be following all named here.

(Those are zeroes, BTW.) Merely lurking so far, but I like it more than Facebook - maybe it's the brevity. Anyway, others here are duly followed, and at some point no doubt I'll be tweeting myself.

I'm @ElectricParsnip

Nice to meet/tweet you all.

Unsurprisingly, although a certain Mr Hepworth had difficulty on the last podcast with it (AND we heard you giggling Mr Ellen while Mr Lewry was helpfully trying to steer you towards the proper nom de plume).

Anyway, Twitter's fun and you can post any old stuff up there for the general amusement of others (and there are some serious wags out there).

There are some good things to follow depending on what interests you. I started following the British Film Institute (BFI) and won a book for one of my tweets. Which was nice.

I tend to read rather than tweet, but some of this lot are *good*!

I tweet when I can. I like to think it's quality rather than quantity, but I know I'm kidding myself.

I'll echo Malc's comment above - more open than Facebook, and terse, which is good. I have another account for work / conference purposes, first tweet on that won me some cake. Result all round.

I'm a very infrequent twitterer, but always enjoy sitting back and watching the hashtag games - when @MrRenoDakota, @Archie_V and @Pencilsqueezer are all on the same game it's like a text version of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. In a good way.

Don't forget the underscore. You do realise as your number of followers increase it will be a full-time job just to keep up with the tweets. When I'm busy I tend to just check the @Beany_ mentions, direct messages or even postings of certain individuals from The Massive. If you do post a retort to Messrs. Hepworth, Maconie and your favourite popstar do not always expect a reply. If you do get one feel free to jump up and down like a schoolboy/girl who has just obtained their missing Smash Hits sticker.

In the more recent past I have had messages of incredible kindness that also appeared as emails and I have tucked them away in my inbox as an example of the wonderful folk that exist in the Massive.

I'm used to tweeting now, but it doesn't really serve a great purpose other than to just talk bollocks in 140 characters or less with others.

What I find most annoying is that unless everyone follows each other there are all these half conversations going on.

And avert your eyes for more than five minutes and you've misssed about 48 tweets. It's a full-time job.

Damn it, why do I always read these sort of threads when stuck in the office where I have about as much opportunity to tweet as I do to score the winning goal in this year's FA Cup Final...?

Note to self... forward thread to home email and chase over the weekend. I too joined Twitter last weekend and am in danger of spilling some aimless beans towards a room full of nothing.

I don't post much here but still love it and consider the massive the be the most friendly forum bunch I've ever come across. I will be following lots of you posting above very soon (in a totally non-stalkery way of course).

You're all on there. I feel like I just wondered into a secret masquerade party - I recognise all the voices but can't tell who's who. It';ll be fun finding out.

My question now is: how do you find any time to do anything apart from monitor your twitter feed? There is SO much stuff out there... And most of it's pretty entertaining too.

Now what?

into the big wide world of social networking (no Facebook yet).

Don't expect anything interesting bar the agonies of my remaining Open University assignments ... but then you never know.

@Phil_Pirrip has arrived kicking and screaming into 2011.

infrequent user I'm afraid - it takes a lot of time and dedication to keep up - more time than I seem to have.

Note the extra 'r' (I sound like a pirate) at the end of my usual Word alias.

That's how creative I am.

I don't tweet very often as I tend to lose my place in the melee of it all. Having said that the Massive hashtag games are works of unadulterated joy. I try not to follow them while at work because I get looked at. I become Finbarr Saunders snirking and furkling at the torrents of wit.

I've yet to get the hang of Twitter but I shall try this week and follow all of you here as a starter.

Ramblings on music,film,football and life. Just like on here then.

Back in 2003 I started a blog called Call Centre Confidential and I found that the key to it was about creating content that people wanted to come back to, keeping it brief and sharp and finding like-minded people to create links. Over a couple of years it became really popular (it came second to everyone's favourite Razzle letter writer Belle du jour in The Guardian's blogs of the year).

I went away from blogging for a bit due to family commitments, coming back to it now under a different guise, I realise that the same principles of content and links still apply, but it is now much quicker.

I'm dirkmalcolm on twitter - alternative film lists

@Dirk_Malcolm, no?

has spent the afternoon making balloon animals. They are breathtaking.

Is me. I think.

I don't tweet lots but I do have fun following and I love the hashtag games.

I am @bookwormairhead which is my internet name for everywhere except here...

have become a more frequent visitor during recent weeks - also love the movie hashtag themes - very innovative and funny - even received medical advice from steven c in belfast-essential

Today I'm @RogIndustries

Tomorrow, who knows.