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The @stackmma twitter bot tweets certain questions (algorithmically determined) and converts the first tag (sorted by number of questions) to a hash tag. Hash tags are twitter's way of sorting things and the article says:

  • People use the hashtag symbol # before a relevant keyword or phrase (no spaces) in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets and help them show more easily in Twitter Search.
  • Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets marked with that keyword
  • Hashtagged words that become very popular are often Trending Topics

Now consider this question that was tweeted to an obscure hashtag #customnotation... In reality, nobody tweets/looks at such obscure #tags. In other words, our classification scheme is not a good fit for what twitter users use. In comparison, the #mathematica tag shows more activity, and I believe, could become moderately trending tags during the release of version 9 or the conference (unless some celebrity has a wardrobe malfunction yet again).

Now we can't use on our questions to enforce this as it is a blacklisted tag on this site (because it makes no sense to tag something on a site called mathematica.SE), but I propose that the twitter bot ignore any site tag and instead tweet all questions to #mathematica. This would possibly reach a more relevant audience and possibly attract more followers.

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    Since the early days of the site, I run a twitter robot (MathematicaAtSE) which publishes the site's RSS feed. I've added the #mathematica tag to its output now. – Sjoerd C. de Vries Aug 24 '12 at 19:51
  • @SjoerdC.deVries In that case, I think I'll remove this request. It's probably not wise to have two bots tweeting the same thing to the channel, which might be considered spamming – rm -rf♦ Aug 24 '12 at 20:33
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    Not sure, I'd prefer the official bot to do this. I can't be sure of the services that the intermediating site provides to get this RSS->Twitter scheme running. I can always remove the hash tag if the official stackbot is set up this way. – Sjoerd C. de Vries Aug 24 '12 at 20:46
  • @SjoerdC.deVries status-completed now! – rm -rf♦ May 24 '13 at 16:25
  • OK, I just stopped the twitbot. – Sjoerd C. de Vries May 24 '13 at 22:23
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All questions on Mathematica.SE that are tweeted now have the #mathematica hashtag - and only the #mathematica hashtag.

  • Thanks, Shog :) – rm -rf♦ May 24 '13 at 16:26

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