It says here in the last part of the page: https://dev.twitter.com/oauth/overview/creating-signatures
The sample HMAC-SHA1 output is
"B6 79 C0 AF 18 F4 E9 C5 87 AB 8E 20 0A CD 4E 48 A9 3F 8C B6"
And the sample result after base64 encoding the HMAC-SHA1 output is
"tnnArxj06cWHq44gCs1OSKk/jLY="
But then I try to do base64 encoding of
"B6 79 C0 AF 18 F4 E9 C5 87 AB 8E 20 0A CD 4E 48 A9 3F 8C B6"
I get
QjY3OUMwQUYxOEY0RTlDNTg3QUI4RTIwMEFDRDRFNDhBOTNGOENCNg==
Based on my experience, base64 encoding a string always makes it longer, not shorter. It seems that the sample signature output in the documentation is incorrect.