Experimenting with Twitter

This week I spent some time exploring and getting to know Twitter. It is a great way to receive news quickly and keep up to date with topics, businesses or people that interest you. On Twitter, each user creates a profile, and then follows other profiles so that they can see these people's tweets on their timeline. One tool that was originally unique to Twitter was the hashtag. A hashtag is created by placing the '#' symbol in front of a word or phrase to turn it into a link that groups all of the other tweets with the same hashtag.

I set up my own profile and started to search for similar travel accounts to follow. I found that when I searched through the #travel hashtag, I did find a lot of tweets about my topic of interest, but not necessarily from accounts based solely on travel. To find accounts purely about travel I searched the keyword 'travel' and found what I was looking for this way.

The hashtag #traveltips turned out to be a great source of information for finding articles about what to do and what not to do whilst traveling. Also searching the hashtag of a place like #Canada or #NewZealand offered a lot of specific travel content.

However, I did find that the best way to find quality content to re-tweet was to follow well known travel accounts. These accounts don't normally hashtag anything but rely on the fact that they have already established themselves as a brand. Because my blog and account is not well known at all, I do have to use hashtags like #travel, #traveltips and #traveladvice to get my tweets noticed by users.

As well as retweets, I composed several of my own tweets that linked to posts on my blog and interesting travel articles I had found on other blogs. Because of the 140 character limit, and short attention span of readers when they are bombarded with so many tweets, I kept my tweets short and sweet. I also did a bit of research on hashtags before I used them. For example, when tweeting about my blog post about the European refugee crisis, I found most tweets used the hashtag #RefugeeCrisis rather than #EuropeanRefugeeCrisis, again probably because of the character limit.

Unfortunately I did not receive any re-tweets or mentions from other users. I did however gain a few loyal followers that have now been following me since I started my blog. I found that I receive the most followers from people following me back when I followed them. I also gained followers when I used the hashtag #travel because obviously that is a very popular hashtag monitored by lots of people.

I am still finding out the unwritten rules of twitter, and I hope that with trail and error I can build up my following on this platform.

My tweets:

My re-tweets: