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The #socialgames Tag For Social Games on Twitter

Posted by Tadhg | Mar 23, 2009 | Filed under News, Social Games

The hash (#) tag is a way to cut through Twitter’s noise to get to the conversations that you want to hear. We’re promoting the #socialgames tag on Twitter as of today.

Using Twitter’s own search facility or a tool like TweetDeck it is possible to filter out much of the noise and get to what you want. When Battlestar Galactica’s finale was broadcast a few days ago the place to be was on Twitter and watching the #bsg tag for comments and reviews. Similarly, every Friday Twitter now has a sort of party called #followfriday in which users suggest other users that they think everyone should follow.

So the #socialgames tag is to help gather shared links and posts about social games. The tag has also been added to the Tagalus tag dictionary (here). Read on for a simple guide on how to use the tag.

How to Use the Tag

Any time that you post a link or thought that is relevant to social games, all you need to do is write #socialgames to the end of the post. (Macbook users, your # key is alt+3).

You can also tag blog posts from the title. Many bloggers have something set up that re-posts their articles directly into Twitter. We do this through Friendfeed.  The issue is that most of these services do not yet have the ability to hash tag posts automatically. The solution is to place #socialgames in the post title of any article that you post, and it will get picked up within Twitter and be tagged accordingly.

That’s all there is to tagging.

How to Follow the Tag

Most people encounter Twitter as a website first and foremost, but after a while regular users realise that it’s actually not the best way to use the service. There are others (such as Twitter’s Search) that can help find related articles but the best way is to use the service with a desktop client such as TweetDeck.

TweetDeck (and Twhirl, an alternative) and others are very good at performing self-refreshing searches. These searches are the key to following tags properly because as new items are posted you will receive notifications in real time (or close enough) and so this is how the conversation flows.

So all you need to do is install a client and set up a search for #socialgames and the client will do all the heavy lifting for you. There’s really not much more to it than that.

(you can follow me on Twitter @tadhgk)

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