If you use Twitter a lot you’ll know that at times it becomes difficult to write an email or document without catching yourself inserting a #, $ or @ symbol somewhere. I’ve actually caught myself a couple of times doing this. The beauty of using these symbols is that is makes searching and following the vast streams of information easier and more efficient. As a B2B communicator here are a few of my thoughts around these helpful symbols:
#
Some of the favorite # discussions I follow include #pr20, #journchat and #blogchat where there are lively and insightful discussions, and of course I try to use #b2b as often as possible to tag content relevant to this audience.
$
If you’re not using $ signs to at least monitor what people are saying about your company/client than you could be missing out on finding supporters or emerging issues. How does StockTwits work? Here is a cheat sheet from the source itself and I posted earlier about using StockTwits as an investor relations tool here. Essentially the $ works like a # except you are using it in front of a stock, currency or commodity product to create a stream. I obviously follow $CME on StockTwits closely.
We’ve also used the $ to our advantage at CME Group where we’ve created our very own $ for Twitter interviews. Working with the team at StockTwits we created the symbol $ExchTalk to actually interview industry leaders, bloggers, traders and media. You can follow all of these online discussions here.
@
If you’re using Twitter you know that the @ symbol represents your name and identifies who you are talking with. The point I want to make is that I wish people would use the @ symbol more when they talked about brands. If you really want to have a company talk with you than use their @ in your tweet. Afterall, isn’t that one of the key elements of Twitter — to have a dialogue or conversation versus just shouting?
What are your thoughts? Are there other # discussions you like on Twitter? Have you found StockTwits usesful? Let us know.
