Archive for May, 2009

Twitter Hash Tag is #invisibleillnesswk09

Posted on May 13, 2009. Filed under: Online Ways to Help | Tags: #invisibleillnesswk09, hash tag, hashtag, invisible illness awareness week, social networking, Twitter |

Do you tweet? If you ae active on Twitter, there are lots of ways to let people know about Invisible Illness Week. One of the ways to help people find information about the eek on Twitter is to use what is called a “hash tag” (bear with me if this is new… it is to me too.)

So if you tweet, and tweet anything about Invisible Illness Week, include #invisibleillnesswk09 in your post and we will build the number of people who are able to locate information about it online. We like the fact that is spells out “Invisible Illness” but if you find it is cutting into your 140 character limit too often you can also use #iiwk09.
Here is a great explanation from Social Fishing:

A  hashtag (the pound sign # placed in front of a keyword) enables all tweets about that keyword to be found in Twitter search and creates a hyperlink within a single tweet to that search.

Why is that “required”? So you can find all the stuff people are talking about around that subject, regardless of whether you follow those people talking about it or not. For any time-specific event, a hashtag for that event allows you to round up all the tweets around it – which leads to lots of other cool things like being able to find all the other Twitter users who were part of that event (or just interested in it) and, then you can follow them. Newbie twitterers who try it out during a conference can immediately find a bunch of people to connect to. Advanced Tweeps can expand their network. Organizations can find out all the people who were participating in their conferences.

You might ask, well how do people know what the hashtag is for a particular conference? What if people use several? I would say it’s in the organizers’ interest to publicize early and often what the hashtag will be. Just pick one, make it as short as possible (easier for people to use and won’t cut too much into the 140 character limit), make it unique so there’s less chance of it being used with something unrelated, and tell people about it.

If this makes no sense to you you are not alone. Just ignore it. It’s okay!