Twitter Tips for Beginners (4): #Hashtags - Wordless Wednesday

Every Wednesday, twitterers and bloggers around the world participate in a common a sort of a game called "Wordless Wednesday." It's a take off on 'a picture is worth 1000 words,' a photo that requires no explanation. 

Some anipals on Twitter also post #WW for Woof Wednesday. That's basically just folks giving a shout-out to their friends/

On Twitter, folks tweet links to their Wordless Wednesday blog post photo preceded by the #WordlessWednesday hashtag. The photo or pic can be very beautiful, funny, poignant... or just an 'a day in the life' type thing.
 

This was one of my previous Wordless Wednesday posts.
A pic of 2 just rescued dogs needing a home. 

If you don't have a blog, you can still tweet your Wordless Wednesday image using a service like TwitPic, Flickr or Picasa. 

To see how it works, first put #WordlessWednesday in the search bar on your Twitter home page. That will bring up a list of tweets that contain those hashtags.

Type #WordlessWednesday into the search bar.

You'll pull up a bunch of #WordlessWednesday tweets with pics you can check out. It may just open up a window in Twitter, or it may take you to a blog page, where they might have one or several Wordless Wednesday pics. 

This list I just pulled up has a lot of people re-tweeting one person's #WordlessWednesday blog post with photos of chickens. 

You can click on the link in each tweet and see all the Wordless Wednesday pics. It's a great way to discover new blogs and/or people to follow on Twitter - or both. 

If you want to participate, choose a photo that 'speaks volumes.' The idea is not to write about it, but sometimes people do write a bit about their pics. There are no Wordless Wednesday Police.
 

This was a Wordless Wednesday pic of me drinking from the tub faucet,
which my people decided for no good reason to deny me for
about three months. Humans...

Post the image on your blog with the words "Wordless Wednesday" as the post title. Then compose a tweet beginning with: #WordlessWednesday, then maybe a little hint of what your photo is of or about (or not), and then the url link to your image(s). You want the link to that one post with your image, not your basic url, i.e. www.cokiethecat.com.

You want the long url. Mine is http://cokiethecat.blogspot.com/2011/10/wordless-wednesday_12.html, which will take my readers directly to my post, whenever they click on that link, even a year from now. 

Find that direct link, however you do with your particular website or blog, then copy the address bar at the top of your browser window - the whole thing. It will look something this, with your blog title toward the end of the url: http://cokiethecat.blogspot.com/2011/10/wordless-wednesday_12.html

You may want to use a url shortener, so it doesn't take up all your 140 characters in your tweet. There are many, you can just google: url shortener, but I usually use Tinyurl.com. Just put the long url in there and it generates a shortcut url that will take you to the same post. Highlight and copy the shortened url and use that in your tweet.

For example, I've just posted mine and tweeted it with the tiny url. The tweet came out looking like this:

On Twitter, you could click on the #WordlessWednesday link, to see other Wordless Wednesday
tweets, or on my 'tiny url' to go directly to my own Wordless Wednesday post.
These links aren't active here because this is just a picture of a page.

Go ahead and click here to see my Wordless Wednesday blog post for this week.

There are several Wordless Wednesday 'Blog Hops,' too, including one that BlogPaws.com hosts. If you go to their website on Wednesdays, usually after around 9am EST, I think, they'll have their Wordless Wednesday Blog Hop up and open for you to enter. Go ahead and link up if you know how, or try to figure it out. If you can't, we'll get to Blog Hops, soon!

Thanks for reading!
Cokes