Earlier today, I launched the Curse Client to see if there were any updates for WoW addons I normally update from Curse. In fact, there was one: PitBull4 was updated from Beta 4 to Beta 5. After downloading and installing via the Curse Client, I thought, "Hey…why not tweet about the update? Lots of PitBull users out there who might appreciate the head’s up."
So I did:
Note the clever use of hashtags, #wow and #wowui. Now I’m sure most of you who use Twitter and play WoW have used the former at least once. However, I wondered how often #wowui was used. Here’s what I found:
Two uses, ever (or at least in the past 9 days; but Twitter flushes based on numbers not on days, if I recall correctly). So then I tried #wowplugins and #wowaddons (with and without the pluralizing "s"). Nada. Zilch. Zero. Well, what about WoW macros (#wowmacros)? Same results.
Yes, I’m quite aware the #wow and #warcraft hashtags are already used, but try to find addon info there. For instance, try to find my tweet about PitBull using the #wow hashtag. (If you’re clever, you can search "#wow kestrelsaerie" and find it right away: I have seven #wow tweets in the past seven days.)
So here’s my very simple proposal: If we’re going to tweet about the WoW user interface, including links to UI screenshots, addon or plugin updates, or WoW macros, let’s include the #wowui hashtag. What say you? I’d be interested in your comments.
/signed!
twitter is a valuable social networking tool, but its popularity is growing beyond its server’s capabilities. Whoever runs twitter needs to treat it to some upgrades, lest it implode in its own spammage.
.-= krizzlybear´s latest blog post is I’ve Lost All Faith In The Internet =-.
Indeed; the fail whale is not an endangered species.
*thumbs up* from me
I’m still new to the whole twitter thing. Don’t even know what a hashtag is. Is there a quick tutorial for twitter available?
.-= Firespirit´s latest blog post is Lich King in Review – Part 1, The Leveling Experience =-.
A hashtag (# sign) is simply a device to group tweets based on a common theme. They’re especially useful if you want to say something to a group that is much larger or more diverse than your circle of followers.
So for example, if I want to broadcast something to the WoW community, I might use the #wow and/or #warcraft hashtags. Since I use the Thesis premium WordPress theme, if I want to communicate to all Thesis users, I’d use the #thesiswp hashtag.
Not all tweets need hashtags; they are purely optional. But in my case, as I explained in the article, I wanted to let the general WoW community know of the update to PitBull4. Using the #wow hashtag would have worked, but the “signal-to-noise” ratio in that hashtag is pretty low; I thought that using a more descriptive, and more restrictive, hashtag would be more effective. We’ll see.
As for a general tutorial on Twitter…I’d say Bing it or Google it. But here’s an ace you can keep: Twitter is the Mississippi river at flood stage. You can’t capture it all; the best you can hope for is to dip your toe in occasionally and sample the water.
I still think of the wow twitter community as being pretty small. And, I’ve always avoided #wow, despite it’s awesome shortness, because I think it was getting mixed up with vendors and other crap in the trending topics stuff. But those must be erroneous ideas on my part. I’ll try to make the switch.
I use #wow rarely; however, I think for those of us who trick out our UIs, a universal hashtag so we can easily share questions, tips, and news is a very useful thing. Either that, or everyone subscribe to the Aerie and I’ll do WoW UI stuff full-time.
Thanks for stopping by!