Add site specific hashtag to Twitter feeds

Question

Stack Exchange sites have nifty Twitter accounts, eg @StackMath and @StackWordpress where upvoted questions get a tweet.

The tweet contains the post title, a link to the question, and a hashtag based on the most popular tag on the question.

The accounts, and therefore the questions, would get better exposure if there was an additional site specific hashtag. For example, more people would see the @StackWordpress tweets if they also included the #WordPress hashtag, which would probably lead to community growth.

This wouldn't make sense for all sites (eg, I doubt SO would benefit from it), but I think that many (most?) of the the 2.0 sites benefit from this.

So, I am requesting that site communities get to

• vote (via their Metas) on whether they want a specific hashtag
• vote for what that hashtag should be

Answer 1

Nobody is stopping individual sites from voting on hashtags to include. :) There's even a precedent with Project Management and the #pmot hashtag. However, y'all gotta keep in mind the maximum tweet length. Can't go too crazy with hashtags when there's title summary and URL to get in there as well.

As with a lot of site-specific features... there's not much development work to be done here until there's a proven need. Y'all gotta start with a meta discussion to see if your community even supports this initiative and/or thinks the Twitter posts are useful. If there's a tangible upside to this, we'll find a way to make it work.

In all fairness, I should note that we haven't noticed much benefit from automatic tweeting on our end and Twitter is starting to come after site-specific profiles we used to make because they appear too automatic to them. Setting that side for a moment... go ahead, start your meta discussions. We monitor per-site metas and can set up hashtags for the sites that most want them to see if that makes any practical difference.