How does Twitter work?

[Cates Legere]

How does Twitter work?
K i try to send a message to someone but it says u cant not sent a message to someone is not following u....can u sent a message at all to someone?
also i chicked "follow" on a few people and they not follow me....how do ya get them to follow u???
how doe sit work with everything!!! im not used to it at all!
please help!
thx

[Googleâ„¢ me]

Direct Messages - You can only send messages if both of you are mutually following each other (i.e. you follow him, he follows you)

You can get the person's attention by starting your tweet with @person's username. This will show up in their Mentions section of their Twitter.

You can't force people to follow you. In order to have someone follow you, you have to be engaging and interesting. When you follow someone, their tweets will show up in your timeline. If that person asks a question or says something funny, you can then reply with an answer. Hope this helps.

[breezybrabbit]

Twitter is honestly really easy (and when you get used to it, it's better than facebook!)
To get people to follow you, you can't message them you have to 'mention' them, by tweeting and (if you go on facebook you'll know what this means) tagging them... by putting a @ followed by there user name. Then put whatever like "follow me back" etc, so then it would look like this:
@usernamehere follow me back!
Then when they follow you back you'd be able to send them a private direct message.