More about Twitter on CIO.com

We call our tips guidelines, instead of rules, because Twitter was designed to be a very open forum. Some people might feel differently about what constitutes good Twitter behavior, depending on what they hope to get out of the service or their networking philosophies in general.

But based on interviews we did with social media and career experts who have seen people try to balance their personal and business lives on Twitter, we worked up five dos and don'ts for the average Twitter user, from deciding whose Twitter messages (known as "tweets") to follow or what content to share without jeopardizing what matters most in your professional and personal lives.

1. How to Follow and Un-Follow People

Even social networking experts share different philosophies on how to deal with "followers" - the people on Twitter who subscribe to your tweets. Some people believe that if someone follows you, it's impolite not to follow that person back. (Under Twitter's default settings, you'll generally be notified by e-mail when someone decides to follow you, and you'll be provided with a link to the person's Twitter profile, where you can choose to follow the person back and receive his or her tweets.)