Which hashtag should go on your tote bag?

It’s already March, reporters! Good gracious. Now that the winter doldrums are receding (at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere), conference and events are picking up.

I, for one, am teaching at two different events for Open Data Day this weekend – one in Miami and one in New Orleans – and I wanted to do my part to spread the word. But as I said last week, social media promo is not my thing. What can I do to make sure these links go beyond the small circle of people who already know about them?

I just started using Keyhole to know which hashtag to use. It tells me that posts using #OpenDataDay are reaching more people than ones using #ODD18.

I used to a tool called TweetReach for this, but Keyhole seems to be pulling in way more tweets and data. For instance, you can also find who got retweeted the most, what other words people are including, and what hashtags the main influencers are using.

You can also track these hashtags, or users, or words, but that’s a paid service, hence the giant button blocking the bottom of your screen. (Hint: to make the button disappear, right click on it, select “Inspect”, then press the Backspace key.)

Like I said before, social promotion may not be everyone’s bag (and in case you’re wondering, yes, the subject of this email was in fact a sad attempt to rhyme), but it’s pretty necessary in this day and age. How is anyone going to read your stories if you’re just tweeting it out to your friends?

One more thing...

ICYMI last week: Make quick, painless social media images with Canva