Conceiving a Twitter hashtag — and watching it boom
Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, debating (courtesy St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
This is the story of a Twitter hashtag – how it was born, how it grew and how it exploded.
To me, it’s a fascinating tick-tock on the power of social media and the multiplier effect as the network grabs hold. The hashtag was #vpdebate, which our newsroom conceived as a way to follow the tweets from the vice presidential debate in St. Louis last night.
We wanted non-Twitterers and Twitterers alike to benefit from what viewers had to say, so we planned to display “vpdebate” tweets on STLtoday.com’s politics page.
Fresh off the Online News Association conference in September, including a session on the use of Twitter in journalism, members of our newsroom discussed using a hashtag, settled on #vpdebate, and set about trying to see if we could get it to catch on.
I posted the first tweet to use #vpdebate on Sept. 18. A few minutes later, I sent a direct message to Leslie Bradshaw, who led the Twitter session at ONA. She’s president and director of operations of web design and social media firm JESS3. And she described in her session strategies for getting hashtags out there.
She tweeted about our tag. “Leslieann44 Couple of important announcements: Recommending #debate08 (for all 4 debates) & #vpdebate (for Wash U). Any others I should be watching?”
That message was retweeted five times that day. The first “organic” use of that hashtag came a little later that day — and 12 more times on the same day. Then, it wasn’t used again until Sept. 29 — by me. Again, only once on Sept. 30, by our newsroom account at STLtoday.
The day before the debate, Oct. 1, Twitterers used it 11 times. It’s first use on Debate Day was early and by someone I didn’t know (Kristin Smith) from a place I can’t identify. I also reached out to some of my Twitter friends and asked them to use it during the day. They all retweeted about it, and made use of it — as did colleagues in the newsroom.
By about 4 p.m. central time, Twitter Search started showing that the #vpdebate tag was among its top 10 “trending” topics and at about 5 p.m., it was No. 6 on the list. By 6 p.m., nearly 100 tweets had been made with that tag. Two hours later, when the debate began, another 400 had been added. And as the debate was underway, I couldn’t read the tweets fast enough. From debate time until I stopped looking at 11:30 p.m., it was trending No. 1 on Twitter Search.
Twitterers were also using several other tags, including #debate08, #current and #vpdebate08. As it turns out, we used both #vpdebate and #debate08 on our politics page.
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