Tech Tip: Twitter Hashtags and Retweeting

One of the things Twitter is most famous for is the use of hashtags. Hashtags are a way to easily and instantly link one tweet to related tweets. It's like creating a link, but without having to do anything more than type the pound sign and then the hashtag term that follows. For example, a lot of people from OU use the #Sooners hashtag in their tweets, and there's an #BoomerBuzz publicizes some great events organized by OU IT, etc. The hashtag automatically turns into a link, and that link takes you to a page with all the other tweets that have the #BoomerBuzz hashtag. I use hashtags for both of these classes: #OU3043 and #OU4993. For more about hashtags, including their history, check out the Hashtag article at Wikipedia.

Another incredibly powerful feature at Twitter is the retweet when you grab a tweet from another account and post it to your own account. When things are retweeting, that means Twitter fills up with things that people really like — or that they like enough in order to retweet them! I do a lot of retweeting at Twitter; for sure the number of my retweets is greater than the number of tweets I actually compose.

For this tip, you'll see what you can find by looking at the hashtags for these classes: #OU3043 for Myth-Folklore and #OU4993 for Indian Epics. Then, I'll ask you to poke around and find some hashtag that is of interest to you — either something related to your own interests, or to OU, or to this class, etc. I'm curious to see what the hashtags will be!

STEP ONE. Class hashtag. Start by logging on at your Twitter account, and then type #OU3043 or #OU4993 in the search box, depending on which class you are in. By default you will see the "popular" tweets, but the best option is usually to look at the "live" tweets displayed in real time, with the most recent tweets at the top. Scroll on down to see more and more search results:

STEP TWO. Retweet. Scroll on down through the items and find a few that you want to retweet. To retweet, just use the retweet icon below the tweet (the two arrows going in a circle, right next to the star for favorites). I would strongly DISCOURAGE you from using the "retweet with comment" feature that Twitter has recently introduced. For details about the problems with this feature and for a better way to add comments, see my notes here: Classic Retweet. If you are enjoying Twitter, I would encourage you to use the Classic Retweet extension — I use it all the time!

STEP THREE. Get a tweet URL. To complete this tip, you'll need to link to one of the tweets that you retweeted, so you need to know how to get the address for a tweet. Each tweet has its own webpage; just click on the time/date stamp, and you'll see the tweet on a page of its own! That is the address you will use to link to a specific tweet. For example, here's a link to a specific tweet. It's a kind of weird and scary-looking address, but it works:

https://twitter.com/OnlineMythIndia/status/631149606185881600

STEP FOUR. Find a hashtag. In addition to looking at the class hashtag, poke around and see what other hashtags you can find. Some of them will be obvious in their meaning (like #Sooners) while others may be less obvious; #otd is one that I like for "On This Day" history tweets. So, explore Twitter, maybe by looking at my OnlineCrsLady stream or by looking at the OU Programs list, or just by searching on things you are interested in, and find a hashtag that is useful to you. You can find hashtags for everything really, and when you find a hashtag of interest to you, it's a great way to discover new accounts to follow too!

STEP FIVE. Blog. To finish up, create a blog post where you include a link to one of the items that you retweeted and say a few words about why you picked that item to retweet. Then, tell us what hashtag got your attention and why. Make sure to include the phrase "Tech Tip: Hashtags and Retweets" in your blog post title and use "Tech Tip" as the label on the post; then you can do the Declaration.