Recently ClearCash launched a Twitter account and has been fairly active on the popular social network that never fails to make the headlines.
One of the great aspects of Twitter is that it manages to be all things to all people, it´s a truly personalised experience as no two accounts are composed of the same followers and friends. After all, everyone is an individual, and every company has different customers and interests. Another excellent feature of Twitter is the real-time search capabilities that http://search.twitter.com offers.
Tap in a subject of interest into the search field and kerching! within a moment, all tweets and conversations relating to your query appear in chronological order. Use the advanced search and you can refine your search for greater accuracy. And if you use one of the multitude of applications built on their API to access Twitter, you can store, sort, measure and pretty much do anything with the data that Twitter generates every second of the day.
In addition to the inane chatter, Twitter contains a treasure trove of expertise in all subject matters, including consumer finance matters and money saving tips from a multitude of sources.
All said and done, Twitter has it´s limitations - 140 characters for each Tweet is a common gripe - but is 140 characters really such a limitation or is it more the way which we misuse them?
A frequent tactic among Twitterers is to label their tweets with a common tag, known as a hashtag, the # symbol. This allows future searches for the topic to be far more easily searched and organised. Very often, the hashtag is deployed at conferences, whereby the attendees or the organisers will agree a concise hashtag to be appended to all tweets, making the event that much more useful for people researching the conference during and after the event.
The shorter the hashtag the better for everyone involved, as its length directly limits the available space for the tweet itself. However once a mention of a source or an @reply in included in the tweet, plus a short URL in added, the space remaining for the tweet and a useful hashtag becomes even more critical.
Often, tweets become more inventive by the arbitary inclusion of the hashtag preceeding words or phrases in the tweet, or the term “money saving tip” is included, which at 16 characters is a precious 11% of your tweet!
ClearCash have noticed that, despite the plethora of money saving advice, insight, tips, snippets and related information on Twitter, generated by motivated individuals, amateur and professional bloggers, journalists, high profile personalities, high street retailers, large scale advertisers, and the general public, the visibility of the advice would dramatically improve with comparatively little effort by all involved.
Why? - It´s brief, yet specific, and it allows UK users to more easily isolate content relevant to them. It frees up the tweet for the content itself, without having to resort to including the term “money” or “saving” or even subjective superlatives of your “tip” such as “great”.
Other industries have adopted common currency hashtags to great effect across companies and individuals - it raises the quality of their content for the consumption of all users and is a win win. There is no reason why the financial sector cannot come together for the benefit of everyone seeking useful information.
So go forth and append #£tip to your next money saving or consumer finance aimed tweet.
Tags: finance tips, money saving tips, twitter tips, £#tip
