2.1 Useful features of Twitter

‘Hashtags’ in tweets take the form of, for example, #postgraduatestudy (note that two or more words are joined together in this example; capital letters are optional). Hashtags are used to indicate the subject of the tweet. They are clickable links – when you click on a hashtag, Twitter runs a search for all recent tweets which include that topic. Try searching for #postgraduatestudy and #mastersdegree for yourself and take a look at some of the posts.

Individual accounts, however, are set up with the ‘@’ symbol preceding a name, e.g. @pgsearch (Twitter account of postgraduatesearch.com), @postgradsteps (Twitter account of the UK Higher Education Council’s ‘Steps to Postgraduate Study’ guide to asking the right questions about taught postgraduate study in the UK; see postgradsteps.hefce.ac.uk).