Twitter is smoking hot right now — and in the past several months, most of my friends, former classmates and family members have asked me about Twitter. If you haven’t created a Twitter Account for your local business or personal blog yet, now is the time — it’s like the late ’90s when the Internet took off and many of us began to think about buying our domain name to ”protect our beachhead in our market’”.

Here is the very first steps to creating a Twitter account or getting your business on Twitter.

User Name 15 Characters or Less — Think of a Twitter user name that is 15 characters or less for you or your business. Most individuals,  Celebrities and Athletes will use their First and Last Name as their twitter name, their business name or their stage name/brand. Here are some examples:

• Athletes: LanceArmstrong, dwight_howard, THE_REAL_SHAQ
• Celebrities: 50cent, snoopdogg, Emeril, algore, MarthStewart, kathyperry, johncmayer, MariahHBF, iamdiddy, britneyspears
• Professionals: BarackObama, SteveJobs, guykawasaki, andersoncooper, SenJohnMcCain, Gstephanopolous, martinog
• Businesses: TheEllenShow, YelpMiami, readersdigest, MHEAT, nytimeshealth

2) Do I create a Twitter name using my first and last name or using my business name? I would start by creating a Twitter user name for your first and last name. You will probably end up creating an additional one for your business name.

3) Upper/Lower Case, Punctuation in your Twitter Account

• Upper and Lower Case Letters – It’s like an email address, you can use upper and lower case letters. So the twitter account MartinOgawa is the same as martinogawa.
•  Underscore Key “_” – The underscore [_} key is allowed like in THE_REAL_SHAQ.
• Spaces – Using spaces in your Twitter user name is not allowed.

4) Changing Your Twitter User Name –Once you sign-up , it is possible to change your Twitter user name including modifying the upper and lowercase letters.

5) So here is the Twitter Signup form.

https://twitter.com/signup

Note: I would recommend using your real first name and last name rather than an alias. I will talk about this issue later in one of our blogs.

6) After you signup, here is some important information:

• Your Twitter Profile Page is: http://www.twitter.com/yourusername
• To Login, click the Login link at the top of your pofile page or go to http://twitter.com/login
• User Name: You can login with your Twitter user name or email address, the user name field is not upper and lowercase sensitive so I can login with MartinOgawa or martinogawa.

Good luck! See you on Twitter. And don’t forget add follow @martinog and @OgawaDesign!