Why Is There an @ on Your Nametag?
When you attend conferences and networking events, you may notice that people will write their Twitter handle on their nametag. This is a clever way to communicate their name and promote their Twitter feed. I recommend you do this for any event you attend where you think it’s applicable.
Let’s Tweet!
Writing your first tweet can be as confusing to write as your first blog posting. If you intend to tweet about a particular topic, now’s the right time to announce that. Some examples are below:
- “Tweeting today about the city mayor’s campaign updates. Vote Thompson 2010!”
- “Looking for professional bloggers to follow. Suggestions?”
- “Offering free math tutoring lessons for grade school kids in May. Tweet me for details.”
Enrich Your Tweets
Since Twitter is such a streamlined platform, you must do a lot with a little. One way to make your tweets more valuable is to share links to articles, videos, web sites, and other online content that is relevant to your typical tweets or your followers.
For example, professionals who follow the news in their industries will post links to articles throughout the day. This provides a rich reading list that is endorsed by your followers as worthwhile.
Let me sidestep for a moment regarding why this matters.
Rather than reading the newspaper cover to cover each day – still a great pastime for me – you can trust that your follows’ judgment is as good as yours when determining the value of a particular news story. This third-party endorsement filters popular stories to the top of the trend of topics throughout the day. The sum result is, “Everyone is tweeting about this. I should read it, too.”
This is not groupthink. Rather, it’s pulse-taking and a means for you to participate in the topics of the day. It also slims down your information intake on a daily basis to only key items if you want a quick digest instead of full, deep analysis.
We all suffer information overload, and cannot possibly read as much as we would like to each day. If we did, we would have no time left to do our jobs, engage in real life, and remember to take out the garbage. In short, be willing to skim, contribute, acknowledge, and move on when the conversation fizzles.
URL Shorteners
When you want to share a link to a news story, you probably copy the web site address from the address window in your browser and paste it into an email, then send that to your friends, colleagues, and others.
This limited form of sharing makes passing along information cumbersome. By using Twitter to share links, all of your followers see it and judge for themselves whether to click through. By tweeting, you did not add yet another email to a person’s inbox (remember how overwhelmed we already are with information?). By using Twitter you made it easy for your followers to share it to their followers (called a “retweet”).
So what happens when the web site link is more than 140 characters long? That leaves no room for your tweet itself.
The solution is to use a URL shortener service.
Here’s two popular, free services and how they work:
- TinyURL.com is a popular URL shortener, and an early entrant to this field. Simply copy the web site address, paste it into middle window, and click “Make TinyURL!” You are given a new URL named http://tinyurl.com/ followed by five random numbers and letters. Now your tweet has a link and room for your message. You can copy and paste this into your tweet.
- Bit.ly is a newer, more popular URL shortener. It’s popularity grew because it also provides statistics on your shortened URLs. If you like to know how popular your tweets are, it will show how many people clicked on the links you post. Again, copy and paste your link into the window to receive a shortened URL of http://bit.ly.com/ followed by six random letters and numbers.
- Like TinyURL, Bit.ly offers a drag-and-drop tool for our browser toolbar that turns the conversion process into a one-click step. Click on the Bit.ly toolbar button, and a side panel opens. The URL is already shortened and the Twitter field is pre-filled with the article’s headline. This makes tweeting an article almost effortless.
I prefer Bit.ly for its clean interface, the statistics it provides, and the easy tools it provides to tweet links. The traffic they attract also bears that they are now a dominant service provider for URL shortening.
Hashtags
Hashtags are another element to add your tweets. They are preceded by the pound symbol #.
Think of them as tags that highlight keywords in your tweet. Using this technique makes your tweets more searchable and easy for followers to find.
There are a few methods to using hashtags.
The most common is to enter them at the end of your tweet or in the body. For example:
- “Looking forward to tonight’s rally http://bit.ly.com/8wzEMF #Thompson #mayor #2010”
- “Looking forward to tonight’s @BobThompson2010 #ThompsonRally”
This tweet communicates what this user is involved in, her attitude toward it, and includes a link to the candidate’s web site in the first example, and the candidate’s Twitter handle in the second example, along with hashtags that make it easy for other supporters of Thompson to find each other.
Conferences and events have begun to include the hashtags that tweeters can add to their tweets. This provides a real-time tracking tool to follow the comments and thoughts of the crowd at an event. Some will post “What a great event tonight!” to “@BobThompson2010 ‘Let’s work for a new era in our city. #Thompson #mayor #2010.”
That second example is a very common type of tweet you will see. It shows that the tweeter is live at the event, and publishing quotes from the speaker as they happen.
This happens often at conferences as well. If you cannot attend an event, it makes a great substitute for live reporting from an event where you can follow along as events unfold.