Twitter is an invaluable tool for Toastmasters today. It lets you interact with other Toastmasters all over the world, sharing ideas that make the organization as a whole stronger. However, for non-digital natives, once you create an account, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of hashtags, @ signs, and 140 character-long thoughts.
Hashtags are used on both Twitter and Facebook and are used the same way for both. They are used to highlight key words. Don’t hashtag minor words. #the is meaningless. What words do you want followers and potential followers to find your content under? In the Toastmasters Twitterverse, the most popular are #toastmasters, #leadership, and #publicspeaking.
A lesson from @google: When it comes to Powerpoint slides, less is more. #toastmasters #publicspeaking https://t.co/rummL5dMjD
— Freehold Phrasers (@FreeholdToast) June 4, 2017
No, I didn’t forget the space in the middle of public speaking. In order for a word or phrase to be highlighted in that familiar hashtag blue, it has to be written as one word. Sometimes this makes phrases hard to read, such as #toastmasterswhereleadersaremade. It’s up to you to decide to sacrifice readability for findability. If a hashtag is trending, findability wins because your audience knows the phrase. If you just created an original hashtag to be different, think twice. For those trying to find an audience, Twitter isn’t the domain to start getting creative. Once you have an audience, then you can create your own hashtags for marketing purposes.
Other Toastmasters hashtags include: #speech and #tabletopics. For accounts that share Words of the Day and Quotes of the Day, you can add #word, #wordoftheday, #wotd, #quote, #quoteoftheday, and #qotd to your repertoire.
#toastmasters #wordoftheday — Ger•mane: adjective; relevant to a subject under consideration. Synonyms: relevant, pertinent, applicable. pic.twitter.com/KU6e6zJudL
— Toastmasters (@OaklandHillsTM) June 23, 2017
Hashtags are only one part of the Twitter formula. The second is the @ sign. This is used to get someone’s attention. Any post you put an @Toastmasters in will appear as a notification to the Toastmasters International account. People looking to see conversations with Toastmasters International can also search @Toastmasters and will see your post.
Special thanks to @mkgon10 for writing this article.
— D83 Toastmasters (@D83Toastmasters) July 6, 2017
The last thing you need to keep in minds is that Twitter only gives you 140 characters to get your message across. Be short and sweet. Use pictures. On Freehold Phrasers’ official account, I uploaded the quote and words of the day as pictures, so the length of the quote didn’t affect the character count.