My topic for the practicum project is to create and follow a Twitter page. I have had a Twitter page for over a year, but have used it once within the last year. I could never understand the point of it... who wants to read it? What do you say? How is it a tool to connect people?
I decided to start by focusing on something that I'd never used before, the hashtag trending topics. I always saw people posting things with the "#" sign in front of it but never understood it. After some searching and stalking I figured out that this was just a way to tag posts, and people tag posts as a way to categorize what they are posting about. Then, when a topic becomes very popular (such as today's #happyvalentinesday), it becomes a top "trend" and this trend becomes a link on the homepage. From here, you can click on the tag, and it takes you to a live feed of all those who have used the tag, and also of the most popular posts that have that tag (example... one of the top #happyvalentinesday is from Justin Bieber...)
I guess what I still am confused about is, how do people know what to tag their post as? If someone put #valentinesday, it would not get the same attention as if it had the happy on the beginning. Within the time I've started writing this post, I can see that 140 more tweeters have tagged their post with the #happyvalentinesday tag. The 2nd most trended topic? #nsn3d. I don't even know what that means. But again... Justin Bieber tweeted about it, so it's popular. Maybe that's how the trending topics get started, because Justin Bieber tweets it.
#nsn3d is Justin Bieber's movie Never Say Never 3D :)
ReplyDeleteDid you know that twitter (supposedly) banned his name from being a trending topic? It's pretty crazy how a site that only allows you to make 140 character posts can lead to somebody having over 7 million followers like he does.