This blog started with someone on Etsy, Gerry of
Gourmet Felted asking me about showing pictures on twitter.
Then I was asked what this # meant.
From there I started busily writing and waffled on before catching myself and screeching to a halt. That`s when I decided to do this blog. Sort of a brush up reminder again.
# That`s called a hash tag.
When you add that to a word you are drawing attention to it. It`s used before a relevant phrase or keyword so it can more easily be found in a twitter search.
If you click on a word that has a hash tag it will bring up other tweets with the same hash tags.
When particular hash tagged words become very popular it is called a Trending topic. To have your hash tag trending is highly sought after.
There are people that support small businesses on twitter and they offer hash tags to use for a retweet. A retweet of your tweet means you have a whole new audience for that tweet and the possibility of it being tweeted onwards still further.
The whole idea of twitter for businesses is to network. Get to know more people and widen the scope of possible customers and to connect with like minded individuals.
If you see someone is looking for a particular service that you know is another of your followers business, then you put them in touch. If you help others they will help you. That is a maxim I believe in and though it may not happen all the time it is more often than not.
I`m still learning too as far as social media goes. I learnt yesterday that it is better to have fewer Hash Tags than more.
I had been going blithely along convinced that the more the merrier was the way to go, apparently not. So now I will have to scale mine down. Oooops.
I have also learnt over time that you have to try and be interesting on twitter to keep followers or gain more.
In my early days I was a bit sporadic with my interest in twitter and really had no idea what I was doing. Every so often I would try following people to try and gain more followers but it didn`t really help much and then I would lose interest again.
Then someone did a `how to` on Twitter on a forum and suddenly I `got` it. Those words of wisdom made sense. If you put nothing but selling tweets it`s boring to read.
Those words were obvious really but until I saw them in print I hadn`t really thought about it. We were told to interact with people, do some interesting tweets etc and re tweet tweets that we found interesting.
There was also the etiquette part. Someone retweets for you? Then you thank them or retweet the same amount of their tweets, or both. As the amount of retweets you have to do grows it becomes impractical to do both, although it is polite to say thank you every so often as well.
All common sense when you stop to think about it.
I no longer randomly follow people, in fact I stopped after those first attempts. If someone follows me, I will look at their timeline and if I like what I see then I will follow back. If I get a message demanding I Follow Back then I won`t.
Someone did this recently and I had already followed back before seeing that message, I immediately Unfollowed and pointed out that it`s a choice NOT a right.
So really as far as it goes, just be yourself. Chat as you would to anyone you meet in real life, be pleasant, have a joke and help out where you can.
Good luck!!
If you enjoyed this post and found it useful please share to help others.
Thank you.
I hope to see you again soon.
