Pound That Presentation: Connect with Twitter Users via Hashtags

Chances are that, as an information professional you have a pretty good idea of what Twitter is and its potential for libraries and educators. Twitter is “an online social networking website and microblogging service that allows users to post and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets” (Statistics Brain, 2013). That simple description belays astonishing numbers: over 241 million monthly global users, who send over 500 million Tweets per day (Twitter, 2014). This gusher has shaped the social, political, and cultural fabric of our connected world. If that sounds too grandiose let’s not forget how Twitter has continually managed to keep pace with text, pictures, and video on a global scale, with events such as the Sochi Winter Olympics, the socio-political unrest in the middle east, the so-called the Arab Spring that started in 2010 and, most recently, the 2014 Academy Awards, commonly known as The Oscars. The host, Ellen DeGeneres, tweeted the following status on her personal Twitter account:

If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap