Written by Rob Hudson | 19 February 2010
Posted in Social Media

I fully understand that many of you may not yet be active on Twitter. I sympathize with the confusion as to why you should change your ways, but I encourage you to give it a whirl. There is a whole lot of useful and/or entertaining information out there in bite-sized chunks.

One way that I recommend that customers get their feet wet is to "listen" before speaking. Go to http://search.twitter.com and type a term that interests you. Maybe it's "Tiger Woods" (I hope not), "Job Search" or "Haiti" that might intrigue. One way that those who "Tweet" help you to sort through the millions of tweets out there is through a "hashtag". Hashtags are simply keywords that seek to group tweets around a topic. They always follow a # symbol. Several hashtags can be added to a single tweet.

For example, this one from @Alyssa_Milano: "Congratulations #NOLA. Your city deserves this Super Bowl. #Saints #WhoDat #SB44" In order, the hashtags stand for New Orleans Louisiana, New Orleans Saints, the "Who Dat?" cheer and Super Bowl 44. We use hashtags to help those who search and also to make sure that our tweets fall into the path of those we want to SEE our tweets. It's a bit of deliberate steering of our message. One way to attempt to maximize your audience is to watch what hot topics are "trending" and toss your voice in there with the right hashtags and terms. One tool to check that out is TwitScoop. For grins, go to TwitScoop and choose menu item "Hot Trends" and then click on the largest term below the "Tag-cloud Snapshot" header. The words will grow and shrink based on which tweeted terms are getting hotter and colder, respectively. Sounds straightforward enough.

IDEA: The AutoHashtag

The problem is, that when I'm tweeting, why do I need to remember all of the possible hashtags for whatever I'm tweeting about? To the degree that I get into a hashtag "rut", I start to limit my audienece again to those who already know that I exist. One solution is to add a feature to my Twitter clients (TweetDeck, HootSuite, Tweetie...) that automagically suggests trending hashtags based on the content of my tweet. Then let me choose the ones that I want to keep. I wonder if I can get #autohashtag to start trending?