In my everyday life, I have not been drawn to the use of Twitter. I never felt a real interest in checking it as consistently as I do with other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. I believe this is due to the way in which I use Twitter, which is primarily for reading conversations between celebrities when there is reported drama. As a result, navigating Twitter was slightly challenging.
However, in using Twitter this week, I have come to realise the significance of the platform in the discussion around certain topics. It definitely appears that Twitter is only suitable for some topics and user purposes, especially those that are able to utilise the 280 character limit effectively.
In my experience this week, and based on my experience with Facebook pages relating to travel, it seems that is not the most favoured platform to discuss travel on as it becomes quite difficult to summarise a travel experience in the form of a micro-blog when there are so many little details to discuss or bring attention to. The platform is effective, however, in bringing attention to longer pieces of writing through the use of hyperlinks, but on the whole, does not appear to host discussions around the topic well in the tweet’s thread itself.
The hashtags that are most related to my topic of interest are:
1. #TTOT
This hashtag stands for Travel Talk on Twitter and is often used by users who share photos from their travels or of destinations they hope to visit soon. This hashtag often accompanies conversation-starting questions asked and answered by other travellers, such as “what are your three essential items when travelling?”
2. #wanderlust
This hashtag follows posts which inspire travellers or describe bucket list destinations.
3. #traveling
The American spelling of the hashtag seems to be more active than the English spelling.
4. #travel
5. #Europe
This hashtag is quite important to my topic as it is the continent in which I have the most experience in, and thus, is the hashtag in which I can project authority and can relate to the most. Hashtags of locations, such as #Paris or #Berlin, are also popular in my topic of interest.
As a tweet has a better chance of receiving more traffic with a relevant hashtag applied, experimenting with hashtags is definitely a necessary task when beginning to use Twitter, especially if the purpose is to build a web presence of some sort. Hashtags are critical in ensuring other users are able to find my content and also encourages retweeting.