I joined Twitter in July 2009 because several other industry bloggers were also using Twitter to build awareness and drive traffic to their blogs, and am also active on LinkedIn. With Twitter there is a constant stream of information, some of it useful, and the rest not so much, so how do you find only the relevant posts?
Hashtags in Twitter allow you to search for only topics that are of interest to you, so in the early days we used #EDA to cover the Electronic Design Automation industry, however I quickly discovered that this hashtag was already in use by many non-related Tweets. Let me show you a search today for #EDA on twitter to give you an idea how many non-related Tweets there are:
Searching for #EDA on LinkedIn is just as noisy as Twitter:
Clearly we cannot use #EDA as a hashtag on Twitter and LinkedIn to mean Electronic Design Automation. What to do then?
No need to worry, there’s good news, I started a hashtag for our industry several years ago, #SemiEDA, to make it specific and unambiguous. Here’s a quick Twitter search for #SemiEDA that I just did, it’s all perfectly aimed at our EDA software industry for designing semiconductor chips, without any noise, it’s perfect:
Pass along the word to your Twitter and LinkedIn network that using #SemiEDA is the preferred way to use a hashtag, just for our interests, weeding out all unwanted content.
