Tradeshow Tuesday: Twitter on the Tradeshow Floor, Part 2

Tweet. Tweets are the messages themselves. They can be 280 characters or fewer (it used to be 140, and then Twitter decided to double everyone’s character limit). They can include video clips, images or GIFs. They can also include emojis, poll questions or your location.

Retweet. You have the option to repost another twitter user’s tweet to your own account. You can simply retweet the other user’s tweet or retweet the message with a response of your own.

Hashtag. These are marked by the # symbol. Hashtags denote key words or phrases that point to an issue or theme within a tweet. You’ll see in the sample tweet above that I used the hashtag #marketingtips to describe a tweet that’s about this blog. Hashtags enable other users who are tweeting about the same topics to find your tweet more easily.

Need another example? #moldmaking brings up a page that shows all tweets that include “#moldmaking.” When you are new to Twitter, hashtags help you find other Twitter users who tweet about the same things, to help you meet others, discover other shops and broaden your networks. At trade shows, popular hashtags include #amerimold, #IMTS, #NPE2018 and industry-specific terms like #moldmaking, #additivemanufacturing, #plastics, #injectionmolding or #automation. You add more than one hashtag to a tweet, and you can search using more than one term to bring up only those tweets that use both hashtags.

Here are the top searches (as of this writing) for #NPE2018 and #injectionmolding (note that both terms are bolded in the results): 

Mention. Sometimes called replies, mentions help Twitter users engage with other Twitter users in their tweets. Mentions are marked by the @ sign, and they are a part of users’ account names. Whenever you include someone else’s account name in a tweet with the @ sign, your tweet will show up in the user’s notifications tab. If I send out the sample tweet above, for example, the @MMTMag account will be notified that I sent out a tweet mentioning the magazine. Get it? So, if you want to include someone in a tweet and possibly get that person’s or company’s attention, mention that person or company in a tweet.