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The Short and Illustrious History of Twitter #Hashtags
With Twitter having made its way to the mainstream, one early tweeting convention has brought a nerdy flavor along for the ride. It can be a bit jarring to come across Heidi Montag tweeting about her “#superficial_album,” using the pound sign to make her tweets more likely to appear in searches and become trending topics. Though we might forget where that # originated, the record shows where credit is due — and it’s to an individual Twitter user. On August 23, 2007, the Twitter hashtag was born. Invented by Chris Messina (then with the consulting firm Citizen Agency, now an open web advocate for Google), the first tweet with a hashtag read as follows: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”
We’ve frequently heard from marketers that you’d like to be able to target your Promoted Products campaigns by gender. It’s a tough feature for us to pull off since we don’t ask people to share their gender on Twitter, and some people don’t identify themselves by gender anyway. Further, we’re not aware of any “male” or “female” businesses or organizations. Despite these factors, we believe there’s value to having more contextual signals, including gender, so that messages reach the most relevant audience. Just as marketers don’t want their ads to reach people who aren’t interested in their message, people don’t want to see mistargeted ads.
Gender targeting for Promoted Products now available
Starting today you can make your presence on Twitter more meaningful with new Twitter profiles. Upload an all-new header photo on mobile apps for iPad, iPhone and Android or twitter.com, and the same image will appear whenever anyone views your profile on the web or these apps. You can upload your header photo, which appears above your Tweets, to express yourself instantly, anywhere.
Because you have more to show
Twitter Says It Has 140 Million Users
Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday on Wednesday by dropping an impressive stat: The network now claims 140 million active users. In a blog post feting the event, the company also boasted that its network sees 340 million tweets a day. "That's more than 1 billion every three days," the post reads. "However concisely, it turns out there's plenty to say." The post also includes a photo of co-founder Jack Dorsey's sketch of the service he envisioned (see picture) The 140 million figure is a 40% increase over the 100 million active users Twitter CEO Dick Costolo claimed in September.
Twitter On Track For 500 Million Total Users By March, 250 Million Active Users By End Of 2012
Disclaimer: Because the company isn’t exactly forthcoming with registration data, calculating Twitter’s userbase is as much guesswork as it is science, so take this analysis with the usual hefty pinch. That as it is, there is some history here, so bear that in mind too. As you may have seen, Facebook has been tipped to reach one billion active users in August of this year. That’s an absolutely amazing number – approximately 14 percent of the world’s population.
Top 5 Tools to Better Time Your Tweets
Leo Widrich is the co-founder of Buffer , a smarter way to publish tweets and Facebook posts. He writes more about Twitter tips and tools on the Buffer blog . Follow him on Twitter @LeoWid . When exactly are your best times to tweet? With over 200 million tweets posted each day, this is a very important question to tackle. When you better time your tweets, you’re better able to reach your followers.Chrysler Twitter - Chrylser F*** tweet
By Erik Qualman | March 14, 2011 AUBURN HILLS, Mich. – Chrysler was a shocked as anyone to find this tweet coming from their Twitter account: This Chrylser tweet resulted in the firing of Chrysler's agency “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to fucking drive.” The tweet was posted by an employee of New Media Strategies – the company Chrysler employed to help them with social media. This employee was fired by New Media Strategies and then the agency suffered the same fate as Chrysler let them go.
