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Twitter Did Not Bless London Ontario
#ldnont is the hashtag many users use to associate their tweets to London, Ontario.
The logic is simple and one of great empathy for our beautiful city: If you want to follow the happenings in London, you cannot simply search “London” in Twitter’s search tool because your Twitter search results will get clouded with tweets that reference London England, not London Canada.
The thinking goes that if you search London Ontario or London Canada, you’ll also be missing the majority of tweets because most twitter users won’t reference a province or country (we have to be frugal with our 140 characters).
Many of you already know this.
What you may not know is if you’re following #ldnont, you’re still missing 77% of Canadian tweets referencing London Ontario.
This morning I aggregated 50,515 tweets by Canadian users that use the term “#ldnont” or “London” in the last 30 days.
Here are the findings (last 30 days):
Tweets that contain #ldnont – 6,483
Tweets that contain London – 44,032
The question becomes: What % of the 44,032 are referencing London Canada? I took a random sample size of 100 and personally went through each tweet to determine if the tweeter was referencing London Canada or London England. I found 49 of 100 (or 49%) of this sample group were referencing London Canada.
Scaled out, here’s how the data looks:
London tweets that refer to London England – 22,456 (51%)
London tweets that refer to London Canada – 21,576 (49%)
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for this problem. I’m merely point it out. If you follow #ldnont, you’re in tune with 23% of what’s going on in London Canada on Twitter.
What are your thoughts on these findings and do you have any solutions?
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Andrew Schiestel is the Chief of WOW! Projects at tbk Creative, a digital marketing & social media agency that instigates and accelerates consumer conversation and action around brands. To contact Andrew about speaking at your upcoming marketing & communications event, click here. Andrew can be followed on Twitter here.
Tags: #ldnont, London England, London Ontario Canada, Twitter, what is a hashtagPosted in Social Media, Twitter | 7 Comments »
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HI Andrew
Really interesting findings – especially as I have just recommended that someone starts to develop their own community around intelligent hashtag use (in the same way as #ldnont is intelligent use).
Interestingly, they have already seen some good results in just a few days from their target community.
What comes to mind is that intelligent hashtag use needs some kind of explanation to go with it. Apologies if I have missed it, but I don’t think I’ve come across an explanation of what #ldnont is or why people should use it.
To me, it’s pretty obvious. I follow you and understand the context of your tweets. I also have a working Twitter knowledge, so it makes general sense in terms of user experience and user convention as well.
If it were me, I would look at what could be done as a marketing campaign for the hashtag itself. Bring it to the awareness of the wider Twitter population, explain the what/why, but also what it can do for them.
What would the user get from referencing #;dnont in their tweets?
Are there any big local businesses who have regular and respected input into the community who you could persuade to use the tag?
I think that if you look at uptake of the tag as a mini marketing campaign, you’ll help to educate Twitter users and might see a higher uptake.
Hope that helps!
Hi Neil,
Great thoughts!
Aside from asking the city to change its name or asking Twitter HQ to add better search filters, doing a marketing campaign for it is a very solid idea.
Andrew
I’ll be really interested to see how this comes off. I’ve been considering a similar approach myself, although haven’t done anything as yet.
The idea of a community based #tag also fits nicely into my Community Network Marketing model – think that it will really strengthen some of that thinking. If you’re interested in bouncing further thoughts, let me know. Would love to reference it as a case study!
Nice look into some stats Andrew!
There is also the issue of multiple hashtags being used in London, ON. I have been archiving London, ON Twitter activity for a couple months now. Here are some interesting stats on hashtag use that I have:
Number of tweets over the last month (October 8 ~ November
for #ldnont / #lndont / #yxu / #londonon = 9824
#ldnont = 8828
#lndont = 943
#yxu = 46
#lonon = 30
23 tweets are over counted in that so I obviously still have some kinks to work out, and these numbers do count retweets as another tweet. Perhaps that is the discrepancy in our #ldnont numbers.
Either way, the point was that there are over 1000 tweets a month with a London, ON hashtag, but not #ldnont.
Perhaps a good start to this dilemma is ensuring a single hashtag is being used.
Apparently smilies are enabled here. That should read November 9.
Hi Jody,
This is great information! Thank you for adding your thoughts and data to the conversation. I wasn’t aware of the additional hashtags being used.
I will be releasing more data soon, so we can pick the conversation up again.
Cheers,
Andrew
Oh how I wish there was a standard protocol for this. In London I see people using #ldnont, and in Windsor people seem to have taken up #YQG (from the airport there). Both work and both make sense, but TOTALLY different conventions.
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