Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If you use social media to get smart on subjects you’re inexperienced in, Twitter hashtags can help you bone up on public relations. Here are some of the best hashtags to follow and use, along with why they’re so great.

Are you looking to learn more about the social network Twitter? Lots of helpful guides exist, but we've rounded up the most popular Twitter video tutorials ever all right here for your viewing pleasure.

Do you favourite tweets on Twitter? Has your use of this feature increased over the last year?

 

If the answer is yes, then you are not alone.

A graph from Isaac Hepworth demonstrates exactly how favouriting on Twitter has increased over the last 12 months. It all stems from the major update to the platform Twitter released in December 2011....

 

It's interesting to note how a change like this from Twitter, albeit a fairly significant one, can begin to alter the way people use a network.

Favouriting increased. But, according to Twitter, it increased in a very specific way. It was often @-replies (i.e. messages that were only really intended to be seen by the recipient) that were being favourited more than more general tweets....

What factors influence whether or not a tweet is perceived as credible? According to this recent study, users have “difficulty discerning truthfulness based on con-tent alone, with message topic, user name, and user image all impacting judg-ments of tweets and authors to varying degrees regardless of the actual truth-fulness of the item.”

 

For example, “Features associated with low credibility perceptions were the use of non-standard grammar and punctuation, not replacing the default account image, or using a cartoon or avatar as an account image. Following a large number of users was also associated with lower author credibility, especially when unbalanced in comparison to follower count [...].” As for features enhan-cing a tweet’s credibility, these included “author influence (as measured by follower, retweet, and  mention counts), topical expertise (as established through a Twitter homepage bio, history of on-topic tweeting, pages outside of Twitter, or having a location relevant to the topic of the tweet), and reputation (whether an author is someone a user follows, has heard of, or who has an official Twitter account verification seal). Content related features viewed as credibility-enhancing were containing a URL leading to a high-quality site, and the existence of other tweets conveying similar information.”...

If you already know your hashtags, great. Use them. If you have an event or brand tag that is relevant to what you’re sharing, use it. To reach beyond your followers, you’ll want to take your topic and search hashtags that have gone out with the topic word(s). Six social media tools provide for this....