Advanced Twitter Search

So you think you’re a Twitter guru. Do you know how to use their Advanced Search Tools to find what you seek?

Here’s a nice brief video from Mashable that demonstrates how to use Twitter’s Advanced Search Tools.

Enjoy!

Video Fridays #21 Hashtags ###

Hashtags – what are they? They could be one of your best friends on social media sites and you may not know about them. According to the Twitter Fan Wiki, they are defined as: “a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Hashtags were developed as a means to create “groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku’s channels.”

Basically, they make it easier to find posts on one specific topic. Facebook has adopted the support of hashtags, too. You can search for hashtags but using the search functions on your social media sites.

Here’s a great video on what they are and how to use them.

So when you create a hashtag, make sure no one else is using it and pick wisely.

Social Media and Search Engine Optimization

I attended a conference over the past two days which included a session on using search engine optimization (SEO) to enhance your page rankings on search engines like Google and Yahoo.

One of the key points is that Google gives more weight to a website that uses a .org domain than a .com, .net, etc. They do this to favor nonprofit agencies.

If you’d like to learn a little more about search enginge optimization for your agency, you can visit this site http://www.seoapril.com/nfp.html . April set up a page of free resources for nonprofits who want to learn more about SEO and see how it can be applied to increase their rank in search engines.