A big thank you to everyone who entered our Twitter competition. The winner of the €50 Spiderworking.com voucher was @OscarBearGrylls.
We will be answering all the questions we were asked over the next few of weeks but here’s two for starters:
Our first question comes from @Madeline from Life Love and Everything.
@Spiderworking How do you know if an event has a twittertag and what that twittertag is?
Twitter tags or hashtags are very organic, some spring up spontaneously, some are created with a specific purpose in mind. Some take off, some trend then die quickly and some never get beyond a few tweets.
Twitter users watching the recent BBC documentary series ‘The Virtual Revolution’ were delighted to see the hashtag for the series appearing at the opening of the show, it was the talk of twitter for most of the programme. Sadly twitter tags are not always as easy to identify. Some events can attract more than one #tag as the recent battle to establish a tag for ‘BBC Question Time’. Both #bbcquestiontime and #bbcqt were being adopted by viewers with most finally settling on #bbcqt, probably because it’s shortness allowed more comment. Although, as far as I can see, the BBC did not create this tag, they have actively adopted it even advertising it on the ‘Qustion Time’ site.
Conferences and events tend to invent their own tags and will often list them on their websites. Some display a twitterfeed screen at the event including the tag. Obviously if you aren’t at the event and they haven’t indicated the tag on their website, it is harder to discover what it is. In this case, searching the twitterfeeds of tweeps you know are attending could help.
There are a few #tag directories, Hashtags.org being perhaps the best, it allows you to either view current trending hashtags or search one of your choice. The result is a list of tweets containing the tag and a graph, showing the tag’s popularity over time. Another directory; TagDef defines #tags, again you can choose from trending tags or input your own. The site offers you a definition of that tag and a list of tweets using it. The definitions are, like Wikipedia, user generated so it is worth comparing them with the twitter stream to confirm the meaning.
Our second question comes from our winner @OscarBearGrylls who asked:
@spiderworking how many companies have used your services to launch them on twitter?
This is a hard question for me to answer as we offer training to groups as well as setting up accounts for individual users so for now that number will have to remain a pretty vague up to 50. We most recently trained a group of Journalists from ‘The Nationalist’ and are looking forward to reading their tweets in the future.
We’ll be answering more of your Twitter questions next week.
If you like cool social media tools don’t forget to become a fan of Spiderworking.com on Facebook where every Monday we showcase one of our favourite apps.
