At the moment, Twitter has over 465 million active accounts, with only a fraction of those people logging in every day. Twitter takes a while to understand, and once it is understood, it only gets easier, and soon you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Here are a few quick tips to get the most out of Twitter:

1. Follow your interests. This is the simplest step. The only way that you are going to engage with others and enjoy Twitter is if you follow people with similar interests and you are able to contribute to the conversation. Clicking on the ‘# Discover’ tab on Twitter’s web page will help you find people and categories to follow, based on your interests.
2. Complete your profile page. Fill out all your relevant information and write an informative bio. Give people a reason to want to engage with you. Upload a photo of yourself and share links. Let people learn about you.
3. Engage with people. Sure, Twitter is a great source of information, but it has been built to be interactive. Chat to interesting people, engage with influencers and thank them for the information they’re sharing. The great thing about Twitter is that it allows us to engage with people we normally never had access to. Almost instantaneously.
4. Share useful and relevant information.  If you’ve followed the first three tips, chances are that people with similar interests to yours are following you back. Share some information that your followers find useful. If it’s worth sharing, they’ll tell their followers about it and spread the word. Share links to relevant news and information online and make sure it gets some attention.
5. Help others. Social networks are all about community. Make your contribution to your followers and the Twitter community. Answer people’s questions. You’re likely an expert in a certain field, and helping someone solve a problem is a little action that goes a long way.
6. Use hashtags. By using hashtags in your tweets, you’re categorising them and making them easier to find in searches. For example, I search for hashtags that include my city’s name and traffic in the mornings to see whether there are any routes I should avoid on my way to and from work. It’s simple and useful.
7. Be yourself. If you’re looking to make the most of Twitter, be yourself. People tend to smell a fake a mile off and tend to avoid them. Share bits of yourself with Twitter. Share a photo or two of your recent holiday, or your new haircut. Sure, it may be silly and not everyone cares, but it helps them put together the pieces of the puzzle that forms a picture of who you are.
8. Forget the numbers. This one is a little difficult for many people to grasp. The amount of followers you have does not really matter. Stop trying to get that number up. Share useful, relevant information and be yourself. By sharing quality content, you will automatically gain a following. Rather let the numbers increase slowly but steadily than see spikes in your follower numbers.

Twitter is a really useful social network where thoughts and ideas are shared. In fact, I’ve met some fantastic people on Twitter that I probably would have never met in real life. How do you use Twitter?