Waltzing Matilda

by @marcoRecorder

Everyone likes ranks, especially when ranks are about you. We love to see how good we are at what we do compared to other peers. On Twitter,  some of these ranks relate to the number of new followers you’ve received over a certain period of time, the number of tweets sent out, milestones that have been reached, number of retweets, etc.  One of the most used tools to get a quick look at such stats and aggregate these numbers is Twitter Counter.

With Twitter Counter, users can create spreadsheets of their data, receive updates on an hourly basis, go back in time and review stats for up to 3 months, and more. The free features you receive with the tool also provide useful information –  such as determining your flow of followers and the growth on your page. In particular, you are also able to display specific days people followed and un-followed your account and predict amount of potential followers to gain or lose in a day or more depending on how the graph flows.

To Twitter Counter’s credit, there are two useful features to get a better sense of how your account is performing:

• You can compare your account with up to two others.
• It guesses the number of users you’ll gain based on how this number has grown over the past seven days.

Let’s see what happens when you type in “@EU_Commission”

From the graph above you can see how the @EU_Commission’s Twitter account has had a steady growth over the past 3 months having 103.562 followers on 8 March 2013 and reaching 124.145 followers on 08 June 2013, recording a +19,87% growth in followers in only 12 weeks.

According to Twittercounter, the Commission currently holds the 12,856th position in the world for followership…

…and the 18th most followed account in Brussels.

The app also foresees that the account will hit almost 130K followers in the next 30 days, and will reach the 150K followers milestone within the next 149 days. We will be monitoring these figures to check the accuracy of their predictions

Twitter Counter isn’t as comprehensive as Twitonomy, as all it really does is monitor your follower count on a daily basis. However, it approaches analytics in a way that’s easy to digest, a selling point if you’re not really looking for a service that lists a dozen different metrics that you wouldn’t know what to do with.

By @kwinlambrecht

We are sharing our daily life experiences on social media, brands are fishing for our ‘likes’ and people are having conversations in what McLuhan calls the global village. Politicians and (EU) political institutions are also starting to understand the importance of social media communication, and moreover, listening. Instead of simply broadcasting messages to citizens, governments are trying to understand the needs and questions that people have, and what they really want to talk about, and respond to that. I personally don’t believe that active social media users are necessarily representative of a whole society, but they can be representative of certain communities, and those communities can in turn have a wider impact.

Engaging with citizens online doesn’t take a social media ‘guru’ or ninja. Common sense, some digital knowhow and basic tools, and an open, friendly approach are your key assets. However, increasingly, we are also beginning to understand the need to be able to reach out locally.

Going local

Using one central Facebook or Twitter can make it tricky to reach people in their own language, and particularly to communicate on the specific concerns and needs of citizens living in particular Member States. That’s why more and more Commission Representations and European Parliament Information Offices are now investing in local social media communication. As part of a pilot project, currently running in 17 EU countries, we are trying to learn and engage more with national social media, to bring people information on EU issues in a way that’s relevant for them and in their language, and vice versa, to be aware of what matters to people in different countries and communities.

The principles of good local community management are being applied on a daily basis, and in my opinion, the following four ideas are pretty important.

Customer service
Social media gives us a platform to respond to what people are saying – to answer questions, to provide information if they can’t find it, and to talk directly with people about issues that come up. Being generous with information – giving people access to ask questions and get quick answers from another human being behind a Twitter handle – is both rewarding and effective.

Content
Frankly, people in France don’t always want to be informed about an EU initiative happening in Slovenia. It’s a massive cliché but content is king. Therefore messages and information are carefully tailored to the needs of the audience – by having a channel to speak directly to a local audience, we can choose the content that’s more interesting and important for them.

Conversation
Starting or joining conversations is top priority – not just for people to talk to the institutions, but also to get debates and conversations started with each other about EU issues. It’s often up to community managers to kick off and support this, and to bring in people or organisations that might be interested.

Collaboration
Opening up to your audience means you care about them, and respect their opinion. Collaboration goes beyond listening; it also envisages co-creation of content – from guest blog posts, and sharing images, all the way up to user-generated campaigns.

So right now, that’s where we are with going local, and it’s proving to be a really exciting initiative, with great community managers working together to reach out. From 1 July, we will have 28 countries and 24 languages in the EU, so the road ahead for ‘going local’ on social media looks set to be an interesting, and important one.

Who’s tweeting in Antarctica? Hardly anyone apparently. After trying “The one million tweet map” you do wonder if the four tweets from Antarctica come from some super-developed penguins or some researchers or explorers tweeting in – 70° temperatures.

It turns out that the few tweets from the region come from a strange account called @googuns_staging which posts nothing but strings of letters and numbers, like b39e65fa00000000, every 5 minutes. Apparently, this has been going on since 2009 creating over 350,000 tweets. I’m not sure what’s behind it. Some have pointed at international espionage or maybe it is just somebody having fun.

Anyway, this introduces what “The one million tweet map” can do. TOMTM is powered by Maptimize and maps the last geolocalized tweets delivered by the Twitter stream API. The map is updated in real-time and displays the latest one million tweets that have been posted since your login. Each second, about 20 new tweets are added and the 20 oldest tweets are removed to keep the same number of points on the map.

One cool feature is the ability to zoom in on a cluster, which splits into smaller clusters until, once you’ve zoomed all the way in, you’re presented with a single tweet which you can click on and read. That way, you can explore your own neighbourhood or visit some remote village in Greenland to see what’s going on there.

You have the option to turn on the heatmap view and monitor the “temperature” of tweeting volumes worldwide. It’s quite interesting for instance to see how Twitter is popular in certain West African countries or in the Arab Gulf in comparison to North African or Central Asian countries .

Furthermore, this tool gives you the most used hashtags worldwide in real-time. The screenshot below was taken on a Friday and obviously #FF seems the most used hashtag of the day.

TOMTM is a good tool to have a quick snapshot of the world’s tweeting volumes and discover interesting Twitter facts. It is certainly interesting for mapping reports when close geographical details are needed. Definitely worth a look!

By @marcorecorder

Open your ears

It is a common misperception to think of social media as different from traditional media. I believe that the more communication technologies evolve the more we must learn to see social media as part of “all media.” However, it is true that some aspects of media monitoring require a different perspective when talking about social media and gathering intelligence.

Do you know what’s been said about you, and where?

In a recent blog post I advocated how audience segmentation (the process of dividing a broad target audience into more specific subgroups) is key to effective communication output (the way we communicate).

When I was asked to prepare a presentation on social media monitoring to gather intelligence I realized how this also applies to communication input (the way we gather information to then produce communication output).

Knowing where people are talking about you and your activities is crucial. We’re currently in an era of information overload and learning how to listen and extract the information which is useful for our communication strategy is not an easy task.

We tend to think that effective monitoring is about being techy or using the most advanced tools or the most elaborate algorithms. At the social media team in the European Commission we are often asked “How can I find influencers on topic X or Y” or “what tools can tell me exactly who to follow on a particular topic.” I’m afraid the answer is: there is no magical tool. Tools will help ease your workload but you should not forget the so-called “human touch.” No matter what monitoring platform you are using or monitoring project you’re setting up, you will always need some manual background research work.

Choose the appropriate monitoring technique

We can distinguish different types of monitoring activities on social media. These are mainly based on:

• The amount of information that needs to be processed.
• The duration of the event/topic at stake.

Roughly I could identify:

• Continuous monitoring
• One-off monitoring
• Short-term project-based monitoring
• Long-term project-based monitoring

Continuous monitoring

“Taking the temperature” of the social media interactions and shared content in relation to your activities is very important. Whether you do that through a corporate monitoring tool or via different platforms, every-day monitoring allows you to be reactive and keep close to the action. It is by monitoring the trends, the data and volumes of information on a daily basis that you will be able to understand when values are unusual (unusually high or unusually low) and to promptly react when needed.

One-off monitoring

This usually refers to monitoring activities which are done una tantum. They generally end with prompt reports and are used to assess the performance of specific activities. They are good to evaluate events such as conferences, debates, press briefings, campaigns etc…Was the event successful? If not, why? Can we do something to counterbalance? This type of monitoring should be used to answer these questions.

Short-term project-based monitoring

Short-term project-based monitoring can be set-up when a particular “opportunity window” opens (alteration of trend and detection of unusual values). For instance, if you are continuously monitoring discussions on social media about “finance”  you will be able to notice when significant amounts of discussions suddenly start revolving around related topics like legislation, transactions fees or regulation. If any such topics is of particular concern for you, it would be interesting to follow a procedure similar to what you can see below.

1. After identifying the issue (i.e. huge concern on social media about upcoming financial regulation) you should measure how far the issue has expanded on social media. This can be done by measuring reach, engagement, shares and retweets, likes etc…

2. Further ad hoc monitoring will allow you to identify influencers and to be able to understand the sentiment around the topic (positive, negative, neutral)

3. After that it is recommended to make a decision on how to engage on the topic with the right stakeholders and suggest a publishing/output or rebuttal strategy.

4. Once this is done, it is necessary to reassess the situation and report it back to the people in charge who will verify if the issue is over or continues.

5. If the issue continues, go back to step 1

If you make step 5 it means that your short-term project-based monitoring becomes long-term.

Long-term monitoring project

These are monitoring projects that are on-going and for which you cannot foresee an exact end date. It’s good to keep an eye on these projects regularly on long intervals or when timely events may lead to values alteration.

Of course there are cases that require the implementation of monitoring projects that go beyond what we have presented here. Nevertheless, whatever monitoring activity you think of setting up, it is important to consider:

• Consistency

Stick to consistent measurement and reporting techniques. This is key to providing effective benchmarking.

• Sustainability

Organise your monitoring activities according to the resources you have at your disposal. Although it is very important to monitor your presence on social media, it also requires considerable resource investment. Try to find a sustainable balance between your workload and time spent on social media monitoring.

• Essentiality

With the help of social media monitoring tools, either expensive custom solutions or free online platforms, you will be able to gather enormous amounts of information. Think about who you are reporting this to and stick to what really matters. Information overload is your worst enemy.

By Deirdre Hodson

Content strategy

A few weeks back I joined 290 people at the content strategy conference in London. The conference was organised (brilliantly!) by Together London with Kristina Halvorson and her colleagues from Confab Events from the US. It was the first major content strategy in Europe with over 28 countries sending delegates. And it seems like (here’s hoping) it’s going to be an annual event.

Here just a few ideas I came away with:

We are all struggling with content

In her opening talk Kristina talked about why organisations are finding content so difficult. Many of us do not have the right infrastructure in place to deal with the huge and complex demands that web publishing places on us. We need to lose the “launch it and leave it mentality” and stop using our sites as “land-fill”. This is complex as it means changing culture and changing the behaviour of many people.

Voice and tone count

Kate Kiefer Lee from Mailchimp gave a compelling presentation on the importance of voice and tone guides for organisations – especially for those of us with decentralised publishing which was the case for many of us in the room.

If you have limited time and resources don’t worry about a style guide as there are many good ones out there but invest in creating a Voice and Tone guide  – Mailchimps’s guide is accessible to everyone. This will help writers know how your organisation should sound. Maybe there should be different tones for different content, eg for legal, contact, educational etc.. but the overall voice stays the same. She recommended reading content out loud to “stop you sounding like a robot”. The way we write affects the way people feel. When considering what content is appropriate for a given experience, we should think about what users might be feeling when they arrive — and how we want them to feel upon interacting with our content or completing a task.

Gov.uk are a real example to follow

Yes they are the rock stars of government web and it was great to meet some of the team having read so many of their blog posts over the past couple of years. Sarah Richards gave a great presentation on the project as a whole and spoke about what their team (now 200 strong) have been doing to save over £50 million  in taxpayers’ money. She said their starting point was to ask what users needed and not what government thought they needed. They looked at every page of their content and for each one asked “What is this for”. They prioritise what is needed by 80% of their users and they place this up front and central on each page.

Mobile – dangers of a new digital divide

Karen McGrane, author of Content Strategy for Mobile, warned that we need to be very careful that mobile does not become another silo. For many users their first and only access to the internet will be though a smartphone or tablet. Mobile web is disruptive and will redefine what web means. We cannot give mobile users a sub-optimal experience and favour desk-tops users. True accessibility means our sites can work well for mobile users too. Good content can and should transcend device. Mobile growth can give us a good excuse to write more concisely and clearly. There is no such thing as writing for mobile – there is just good writing.  As another speaker put it, “The desktop is no longer the prime source of truth… we have to start breaking our content down from these massive pages into smaller flexible units.”

We need content armies

Responsibility for content needs to be taken seriously and be worked into job descriptions  so there is accountability for creating and managing content. Sally Bagshaw in her talk said that the rise of Content Management Systems had meant the loss of editorial control for a lot of organisations. We heard some good examples of successful projects like pharmaceutical company Merck who with a team of 20 staff and support from professional agencies managed to consolidate 70+ CMSs into just one global platform, and more than halved the number of channels through which the company was distributing content.

It was a great two days and we had plenty of time for chatting and swapping stories. It was great to be with so many people who care deeply about quality web and quality publishing.. All of us face similar problems so it’s good to be reminded that we are not alone. Would be great to have a similar conference in Brussels for all of us working on content here…

Written by evanbwoods

I admit I was going to call this post ‘Appy talk’ but a quick search showed that 11,000 people had already had the same idea. ‘Appsolutely fabulous’? 60,500 results. It seems that I’m not the only one thinking up terrible puns on writing about mobile apps.

It’s not surprising though. In parts of Europe, 57% of the population have a smartphone. This figure keeps increasing as does the number of apps being bought and being developed.

Here in the European Commission’s central digital communications team, we provide advice and support on all things web and social media. More and more, we are asked for guidance on mobile web projects for smartphones and tablets. You can find the official guidelines elsewhere but our advice is basically:

Don’t do an app. Do a website that works well on a mobile.

This post explains why.

How we use apps

Think of five apps that you use all the time. For me, it would be: Mail, Facebook, Google Maps, Evernote, BBC News. OK, yes … and Angry Birds Star Wars. What do they have in common? I use them every day. I use them to get something done. That can be finding my way around town, checking my email, checking posts and updating my status on social networks or checking the news from one of my go-to sources.

Now think about what you do when you’re looking for some information or, more specifically, EU information. This could be something like the latest on an EU policy or law, something about your consumer rights or how to get European funding.

The chances are that this is information that you only need from time to time. So you’re likely to do a search in your phone’s web browser and cross your fingers that the site is readable on your phone. You’re less likely to visit an app store and search for an app that has this information.

In a nutshell: Go for an app if you want your audience to perform a task repeatedly. Go for a website for providing information and content.

Appsolutely not?

The Commission has created apps in the past and we’re not saying that apps don’t have advantages : they are usually tailored to single task so they can be less complicated to use than a website. It is also easier for an app to use the phone’s internal hardware (e.g. camera, accelerometer) than for a website. Yet, most of the time, the European Commission is just providing straightforward information.

Tough competition

It’s also important to know that the app world is incredibly competitive. There’s the competition to get your app noticed in an app store and get downloaded. And after that, your app faces even stiffer competition: battling with other apps for your user’s attention.

The Nielsen Norman Group reports that the average user has 41 apps installed on their phone. However, 51% of users only use 5 apps at least once a week. If you swipe through your own phone, you might find some apps that you forgot that you had even downloaded. You’re not the only one: a quarter of all apps downloaded are opened once and never used again.

So if you’re going to create an app, make sure that it is original and useful and that it is something that your audience will use again and again.

The alternative

We want our content easily accessed on phones so when we say “go for a website”, we mean a website optimised for mobiles. We don’t mean a dedicated mobile website – we’ll go into more details in a future post but we recommend a website in responsive design. That’s a site where the layout changes and adapts to the screen size – one website fits all. Already, you can find out about your EU rights on such a website.

This approach has a couple more advantages over apps:

It’s cheaper: Developing an app is more expensive and development is often specific to each platform.

It’s easier to maintain: A website can be easily maintained in-house and content updates can be made immediately. So far, most app development here has been done through external suppliers. As a result, updates require additional development and then the app must be re-submitted to the app stores. Also, changes to a mobile operating system can affect an app and this is further complicated if the development contract has already ended.

It’s easier to find: The entire content of a website is indexed directly by search engines so it can all be easily found. An app is more difficult to find and only its app store page is indexed by search engines.

App the end of the day

So when everything is considered, we definitely think a website is the best approach for most European Commission mobile projects. Keep your eyes out for an upcoming post where we’ll explain how we’re helping make EU sites work better on mobiles.

photo credit: Daniel Y. Go via photopin cc

Written by @marcoRecorder

Timing is a key variable when analysing online publishing and promotion. While we try to make the best out of our social media channels we should not neglect the “t” factor and make sure we are posting at a time that would guarantee maximum exposure and visibility.

It is a common misperception to think that Twitter is a sort of guessing game, especially when it comes to timing. In particular, if you have a huge number of followers it is unlikely that will all display the same uniform presence on Twitter throughout the day or the week. For the sake or your social media strategy it is essential to know when you will (statistically) get the most exposure. If you want your followers to see your tweets, you need to post when they are online.

Compared to other social media platforms, Twitter users post much more regularly so it is easy for an individual tweet to get buried in the feeds’ waterfall. To get your tweeting timing right you can use Tweriod, a free tool that runs an analysis of your followers providing the best time to tweet.

To sign up you need to grant the service access to your Twitter account like any other app, without posting and promotional tweet on your behalf. Within 10-15 minutes, it generates a report which you can consult on your Tweriod dashboard but you can also receive it via direct message or e-mail. Unfortunately, free accounts can only generate one report every 30 days.

Tweriod’s dashboard is easy to understand and offers a number of interesting details about the timing of your Twitter account. The report shows you what times you have the most exposure, and breaks it out into weekends, weekdays, and specific days of the week. It also shows you what time most of your followers are online, and again breaks it out into weekends, weekdays, and specific days of the week. It even includes an hourly breakdown of your online followers.

See for instance in the analysis provided to @EU_Commission Twitter account:

• During weekdays the Commission’s account is statistically most likely to get best exposure between 12PM and 1PM and between 3PM and 5PM.
• Regardless the day of the week, we can see a trending curve suggesting that our posting would reach maximum exposure from the late morning to the late afternoon.

Don’t guess your tweeting timing. Have this app help you know when your followers are online.

Written by Marco Ricorda @marcorecorder

Writing a 140-character-long bio is challenging. Not only you have to describe who you are in such a short space, but you must also be able to communicate how you want to be perceived. Besides, once you’ve managed to squeeze all this in, you’ve probably not managed to describe what your tweets are actually about. If you are a doctor, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will tweet only about surgery, the flu or tropical diseases. The same applies to institutions. Mostly, people know who you are and know what you do, but your Twitter activity will hardly be understood merely by reading your bio.

One way to get a quick but comprehensive glimpse of what a profile tweet is about is to produce a word cloud. Word clouds are popular visualizations of words typically associated with Internet keywords and text data. They are most commonly used to highlight popular or trending terms based on frequency of use and prominence.

Word cloud generators are proliferating. Wordle for instance is a great tool to generate word clouds if you already have the list of words you want to play with. Online you can find a few platforms that help you generate word clouds based on a profile’s tweets. I have tested some of them using the European Commission‘s account. Let’s see what came up.

Cloud
Cloud is created by a Dutch expatriate programmer in Australia. It provides a search string where you can type in keywords, profiles, hashtags etc… with the option of excluding some keywords (equal to the NOT Boolean function). It is pretty basic and the word cloud is quite big which makes it hard to then take a proper screenshot. The words in the word cloud then link you to the corresponding word cloud regenerated by the same platform.

This is what comes up if type in @EU_Commission

Tweet cloud

Tweet cloud is a more thorough tool than Cloud. Firstly, you can select a tweets timeframe which allows you to see your word cloud of the last day, week, month or even years. This brings great added value in performance assessment.

However, there are some pitfalls. For instance, if you type in another profile’s name, to see what this profile tweets about, you can’t see it. As an example I typed in “EU_Commission” from my personal account and according to Tweetcloud “If @EU_Commission is a username they probably never used Tweet Cloud before. If @EU_Commission is just a word it needs to be in someone’s top 5 words to make it on this page.” Ergo, this is not very useful to analyse other profiles’ interests.

It is a free tool but extra features are available if you pay them a Tweet, namely

• identifies people you mention the most
• shows related twitter users
• shows related clouds
• your account gets displayed when someone mentions or searches you

Nevertheless, it’s not clear how you can access these features and there is no contact form. Thus, nice product but they have a long way to go in terms of user-friendliness. Here is the word cloud generated from the Commission’s account within the timeframe 01 January 2012 until today. You can clearly see mentions of the Nobel Peace Prize and its ceremony, the State of the Union speech and other activities related to the European Year of Citizens.

My Tweet Cloud

My Tweet Cloud allows Twitter users to get a tag cloud generated with hashtags used in their last 200 tweets. They use Twitter API to search hashtags in your tweets and tag clouds can be updated once a day.

The good thing about My Tweet Cloud is that the generated cloud links directly to the hashtags that are highlighted. This is very user-friendly in comparison to the two previous tools. I find the cloud a bit too long (in case you want to provide a screenshot) but it is a minor flaw on a pretty decent free tool. Plus the graphics are quite appealing too.

By looking at the wordcloud generated by inserting @eu_commission you can see highlights from the recent Citizen Dialogue in Coimbra and affiliated hashtags #EUDeb8 #EYC2013 and #EUchat.

Tweet-cloud (Beware this is not Tweet Cloud. notice the extra hyphen in-between the two words)

Tweet-cloud is quite basic and, as it says, it’s currently under construction, but it might be just what you need when wanting to word-cloud a profile’s tweets. In fact, you just need to insert a Twitter profile (or a word, a hashtag whatsoever) and the number of latest tweets you want to look at. After that, Tweet-Cloud links the words that come up in the search directly to Wordle. This way, you have great flexibility playing around with the cloud and customize it as you like. Below you can see a sample made with the Commission’s account

This is the best free tool available to word cloud tweeting activities. Simple, clear, flexible. Nothing to add.

The @EU_commission Twitter account has reached 100,000 followers! Read the full entry

Written by Marco Ricorda @marcorecorder

It is true. Beethoven used the # to compose his immortal music and certainly wasn’t doing so with the intention of joining a Twitter chat or to check what people were sharing in the Hapsburg Empire in the late 18^th century. He also had the choice of using other musical keys ♭ or ♮ and he knew how important it was to find the most suited to his music.

Memes apart, whether you are working on your next digital campaign, trying to attract buzz towards your latest online event or simply spread a message it is essential to create the best hashtag to achieve your goal simply. As bizarre as it sounds, hashtags are becoming an integral part of our lives. Just think that, the American Dialect Society crowned “hashtag” the word of the year, the French Commission Générale de terminologie de néologie recently adopted mot-dièse as an official new word and one couple even went as far as naming their child Hashtag…it is such a global social world.

Every hashtag has its own purpose and it is not a waste of time to investigate how you can optimize it. In the Social Media Team at DG COMM we often have to go on a “hashtag creation journey” where we gather for brainstorming sessions filled with question marks, possible scenarios, predictions and white boards full of suggestions. Nevertheless, at the end of the day there has to be only “one hashtag standing” (or maybe two). By thinking backwards to our most recent brainstorms, I could identify a few main principles we tend to stick to while forging a new hashtag, Namely, these are:

• Purpose
• Originality
• Appropriateness
• Format
• Branding

Purpose

What will the hashtag be used for and who will be your target audience? As advocated  in a previous post, audience segmentation can  help you understand to who you are communicating  to and how your target audience behaves in social media. This should be a two steps process:

Firstly, think about what you want to achieve. Are you looking for buzz, to gather a specific community, get scientific feedback, get your word out, be viral, etc…?
Secondly, think about who you want to target. Are you hoping to involve everyone, a few selected journalists, experts, pundits, etc…?

These questions largely depend on your target audience. If they are part of a small special interest group and are interested in closed conversations, creating a viral, trending tag would not be a priority so much as creating a tag that works well for the group members.

Originality

It is not compulsory to be unique but it is better to be original. If the hashtag you have in mind is being used already it will be hard to make it stand out of the crowd. You can make an exception if the hashtag you have in mind has been used scarcely. A number of free tools can help you check on the hashtag’s availability such as Hashtracking, Hashparty, or the simple Twitter search.

Appropriateness

Always cover your angles. Before you settle on a hashtag, consider whether there might be any negative fallout. Even if the hashtag has never been used, it could be “owned” in the sense that it is already a common phrase familiar to others and being used in a context unrelated to your digital activity. If your hashtag is unintentionally offensive or inappropriate (also in other languages), it is unlikely to generate the outcome you look for.

Format

Nothing kills a conversation quicker than running out of space. Don’t choose a long hashtag. There is not an ideal size for a hashtag but think how every character you’re using is one character less than the 140 you have at your disposal. i.e. #thisimyawesomenewhashtag will get you somebody’s attention but will kill the engagement. Less than 9 or 10 characters should do it.

It’s interesting to use initials, acronyms and abbreviations to keep your hashtag short. This works especially when your audience is already familiar with such form of shorthand like our recent #EUDeb8 or occasionally adding in the year like in #EYC2013.

Branding

Keep your goals in mind. Your hashtag will be promoted via other channels than your social media platforms. Whether you intend to use it continuously or intermittently it is good to consider how linked to your identity it is. Make sure your hashtags work as reflection of your long and short-term goals. Nevertheless hashtags are a user-generated feature of Twitter. Once you have your “newborn”, be ready to promote it via your traditional channels too and think of it as the “plaque” all users will identify YOU with.