Follow me — click on the image to enlarge

See this article in Spanish and French>>

Also see:

•  Twitter series (part 1) “Twitter overdose” 
• Twitter series (part 3) — Meet the social media expert

On Twitter if someone follows you it means that your Twitter updates will appear on your followers’ Twitter home page every time you post a new message. Being followed increases your chances of having your tweets retweeted by others and eventually gain more followers. Your number of followers and the number of times your tweets get retweeted help to build your Twitter reach. (see this article on Freelance Switch with a list of tools for analyzing your Twitter stats) However, there is a way in which you can make your tweets reach more people other than your followers. When you use hashtags, which are “a community-driven convention for adding context and metadata to your tweets created by simply prefixing a word with a hash symbol, e.g.  #hashtag” you are broadening the reach your tweets since all those on twitter who are following that certain hashtag will be able to see your tweet. Hashtags were developed as a means to create “groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. As mentioned in my previous post, the hashtags used for translation are #xl8 and #t9n, #L10n is the one used for localization and #flinternet refers to “foreign language Internet”. Since hashtags are a convention among Twitter users anyone can create a new hashtag. This is particularly the case for events: a new hashtag is created to tag the news related to that event. It is also very likely that these type of hashtags fall soon into disuse (i.e. as soon as the event is over or a little after that). Some examples of hashtags specially created for events are: #smday for “Social Media Day” celebrated on June 30, 2011 and #lwbar for “Localization World Barcelona”. So if you are interested in following an event on Twitter you should try to find out which hashtag is being used. As you may have realized by now, having many followers is seen as a positive indication of the person’s influence and the relevance of the content of their tweets. I guess this is why everyone on Twitter is so fond of the “Follow me” phrase. So if you like this post and my comic follow me… but only on Twitter! Romina