Twitter 101 Chapter 2 HASHTAGS AND MORE

We left you hanging in our last blog post about Twitter so let’s go into some detail on how to effectively use Twitter. Before you figure out what to tweet you’ll need to figure out the basic mechanics of tweeting. In the last post I gave you an example of one of the current popular trends on Twitter: #for65milliondollars. Users would then insert this into their tweets. For examples: #for65milliondollars I’d go to a Justin Bieber concert. In order to understand trends on Twitter you first need to understand hashtags or the # sign (there are the same thing). If you place a hashtag before a word in a tweet, it will create a link to all tweets that also put a hashtag before that word. So in our example someone tweets #for65milliondollars I’d go to a Justin Bieber concert. #for65milliondollars appears as a link. Anyone can click this link and see all the tweets that include #for65milliondollars. I’m sure you can imagine how tweets like these can become viral. Someone tweets #for65milliondollars I’d go to a Justin Bieber concert. His friend then tweets #for65milliondollars I still wouldn’t go to a Justin Bieber concert. Then his friend’s friends tweet about what they would or wouldn’t do for 65 million dollars and his friend’s friend’s friends do the same until thousands and thousands of people are tweeting about what they would do for 65 million dollars.

When a certain word or hashtag appears repeatedly it creates a trend. Trends are simply to most popular keywords on Twitter. You can easily see these trends on the Twitter website. Right now some of the trend topics are #tenconfessions, #mariokart, Uptown Girls, Kung Pow, and as I wrote this Smash Brothers made the trending list. Trends last about as long as a celebrity marriage, so, like a celebrity marriage, I don’t pay much attention to them. The only time you need to pay attention to trends is if something directly related to your company is trending.

So now that you understand the basic mechanics of how Twitter works, what do you tweet? As unsatisfying as it is, I have to say it depends. It depends on what type of company you are, what type of product you sell and what type of customers you have. Generally speaking most companies use twitter as a place to send out quick press release type of information. For example Microsoft recently tweeted:

The day after - connecting the dots of Microsoft's #E3 announcements http://bit.ly/kH9ZLp via @MSFTNext

This type of tweet is extremely common among businesses. A one sentence explanation and a link for further information is a safe and effective way to use Twitter. Your followers on Twitter are following you because they want to. So often a brief explanation of what your company is doing and a link for more information works perfectly.

In future blogs we’ll give more information about what type of tweets work best as well as some things to avoid on Twitter.