How to use twitter hashtags to record events

In web terms it’s been a relatively short period of time since twitter came onto the scene and the conversation is still in full swing as people discover how twitter works for them. I’ve been tweeting since March and as I said in a previous post I’ve discovered where twitter fits in for me.

I think the possibilities are wide in terms of connecting like-minded individuals, as well as linking brands with customers. Because of this I always include a section on twitter in my presentations or workshops, to be honest I usually encounter a fairly lukewarm response until I start talking about #hashtags – the concept of being able to archive a conversation or micro-blog a presentation as it happens seems to hold wide appeal and creates much excitement. (I must say however that the Standard Bank Pro20 twitter stream created by Brandsh as part of the Pro20 cricket series social media campaign also brings the concept to life for many marketers.)

So what are #hashtags?

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Implementing hashtags allows users not attending an event or conference to still follow the events as they happen. Hashtags also allows for cataloguing of bigger news events – think of coherent, time relevant eye witness reports or damage reports in disaster situations etc. I wrote a brief post about the fact that twitter broke news of the UK tremor in February before the major news networks, had a hashtag like #UKtremor or similar been used the networks may have had quicker, easier access to breaking eyewitness information.

How does it work?

1. You need to open a personal account with twitter – see mine for example.

2. twitter works on the basis that you choose to follow certain users and users choose to follow you (like facebook friends) in order to be able to send #hashtags and have them indexed you need to find and follow hashtags.

3. When you tweet from an event or similar then use a pre-agreed hashtag in your tweets see #newmedia08 as an example I use in presentations. The hashtag can be anything relevant – #sandtoncityfire, #earthsummit08, #A1Durban, #zimelections08 – use and agree upon a suitable, brief description.

4. When you use the selected hashtag in each relevant tweet then hashtags will automatically pick your tweet up (as I mentioned you must be a follower of @hashtags however.) Note also that anyone can pick up and follow the hashtags page (like this one)

It’s simpler than it looks and an incredibly powerful way of indexing tweets as they happen for anyone to view. It takes the possibilities twitter offers beyond the obvious and allows for a bigger collective conversation – a powerful tool for brands, information sharing and most definitely for news reporting.