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Why Use Twitter? Notes for My Journalism Expo Twitter Training

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

On Friday, May 1, I’ll be helping to give the free social media training being offered by the Public Media Collaborative for Bay Area people who work for mission-driven organizations — community organizations, church groups, social service agencies, charities, etc. It’s part of Journalism Innovations II: New Work & Ideas for Making the News, an event organized by Arts and Media. Social media training will be offered in English and Spanish.

  • WHEN: May 1, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. PT
  • WHERE: McLaren Hall, University of San Francisco (Directions)

I’ll be handling Twitter training, from 1-2:15 pm.

So: What do people who do community- or mission-focused work really need to know about Twitter? First, it helps to know why it works. After that, learning how to use it makes much more sense…

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Hashtags on Twitter: How do you follow them?

TweetDeck
Column-based Twitter applications like Tweetdeck can make following hashtags easy. (Image by Tojosan)

As I’ve mentioned before, hashtags are a powerful tool that allows Twitter users to track what many people (especially people whom you aren’t already following) are reporting or thinking about a particular topic or event.

Here’s the catch: Hashtags aren’t an officially supported Twitter service. They’re merely a convention that Twitter users have adopted on their own, within the 140-character text-only constraints of tweeting. So you can’t really “follow” hashtags through the main Twitter site.

Many third-party Twitter tools and services “play nice” with hashtags — but you must first know what these tools are and how to use them in order to get maximum value from hashtags.

This can lead to a bit of basic confusion, especially among people who are new to Twitter. Specifically, how exactly do you follow a hashtag?…
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What’s that Hashtag? New glossary tools for Twitter

On Twitter, hashtags are a powerful, simple tool for tracking topics, communities, live events, or breaking news. They make you findable, and they allow on-the-fly collaboration. When you insert one of these short character-string tags beginning with #, you make it easy for Twitter users who don’t already follow you (plus anyone searching Twitter) to find your public contributions to the coverage or discussion on that topic.

The catch is that hashtags are often cryptic — usually because they work best when they’re as brief as possible. So you might stumble across an interesting-sounding tweet containing a hashtag like #wci, #plurk, or #tpb and wonder about its context. Although you can follow a hashtag easily with tools like Twitter Search, Hashtags.org, Tweetdeck, or Twitterfall (which Paul Bradshaw recommended yesterday in Tidbits), those tools don’t easily tell you what a given hashtag means.

Here some promising new tools that can help you quickly put a hashtag in context — or let people easily look up the meaning of the hashtags you launch or use… Continue reading →