What is #Yorkshirehour?
#Yorkshirehour is a weekly Twitter chat for businesses, charities and event organisers in Yorkshire.
When is it?
8-9pm (GMT) every Wednesday on Twitter.
How does it work?
1. Using a hashtag (#) allows tweets about a specific topic to be grouped together and displayed in a Twitter search so that everyone can follow all the conversations about that topic all in one place.
2. To see what people are saying during #Yorkshirehour, go to the search box on Twitter and type '#Yorkshirehour' any time between 8pm and 9pm on a Wednesday evening and click on 'All Tweets'.
3. To add your own message, compose a tweet about your business, charity or event, making sure you include '#Yorkshirehour'. Your message will then appear when anyone does a Twitter search for '#Yorkshirehour'.
5. #Yorkshirehour is not about gaining followers: it's about developing connections and it's also a platform for free advertising to small businesses who may not have a budget for any other form of marketing.
6. In order to get the most out of #Yorkshirehour, you need to talk (well, tweet) with other people. If you're not feeling confident enough to start a thread of your own, join in a conversation that someone else has started. Don't forget to include the hashtag '#Yorkshirehour'.
7. To join in a conversation, just click 'reply' and get tweeting. Or, if you think a tweet will be interesting to your followers, then retweet it. Others will soon retweet your messages to their followers too.
8. To chat with someone in particular, make sure your tweet includes their Twitter name (e.g. @Twittername). To talk to us include @Yorkshire_hour for Helen and @Aspinall_Ink for Angie.
9. #Yorkshirehour can be a little overwhelming at first, especially if you try to keep up with every single tweet and follow every conversation but, don't worry, the tweets don't go anywhere so you can always come back to the Twitter search at a later date and read through any that you've missed.
10. If you want to come back to a particular tweet or contact a particular person later, you can always 'favourite' their tweet so you can find it again easily.
So, there you have it. All you need to know about #Yorkshirehour and how it works.
Why just one hour a week?
When lots of people tweet using a hashtag (#) in a concentrated period of time, then the topic may trend. When a topic trends, more people will find out about it and they too may join in. Focusing all the tweets into an hour will help our topic to trend and that in itself will help raise awareness about it.
New to Twitter?
- If you don't have a Twitter account, it's easy to set up an account here.
- Here's how Twitter works.