Thing 9: Engage with your network on Twitter

Now we’ll explore how to engage with your network on Twitter through replies, retweets and hashtags. Replies are self-explanatory: they are tweets you send in response to someone else’s tweet. Retweets takes someone else’s tweet and forwards it to all your followers e.g. if you thought the tweet was interesting and want to share it with others. The step-by-step guide for thing 9 describes how to reply and retweet in the context of using hashtags but please note that anything on twitter can be replied to or retweeted, even if it has no connection with a hashtag.

Hash tags are a way to mark a tweet as being about a certain topic. For instance if I tweet about BBC Question Time during the show, I’ll mark the tweet with the hashtag “#bbcqt” e.g. “not convinced by government minister’s answer #bbcqt”. This hashtag is an established convention, encouraged by the BBC show’s producers, to facilitate discussion about the show. When you click on the hash tag in a tweet, or enter it into the ‘search’ box at the top of the twitter interface, all tweets marked with the hashtag will be displayed. In this way hashtags let Twitter uses see what people are tweeting about events, issues or topics.

Additional Resources:

• Twitter hashtags explained
• The Twitter Hash Tag: What Is It and How Do You Use It?
• LSE Impact Blog posts about using Twitter as a researcher

Emma Cragg : 07 Nov 2011 10:00 |  Tags: Networking Theme4 Twitter |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem