It’s Time to Get Rid of the “#NwIndiana” Tag on Twitter

It has been just under a year since ValpoLife has been using Twitter to help us in spreading the message about all of the good things going on in Valparaiso. Sometimes, we like to let the rest of The Region know what’s positive in Valpo through our use of hashtags.

Hashtags are Twitter’s mechanism for keeping topics together. Want to start a conversation? Start a hashtag. Looking for someone’s thoughts on a particular topic? Search for a hashtag. We even use a special application (Tweetdeck) that helps us manage multiple hashtags and accounts. However throughout the year, there’s been something I’ve never understood: Why are there two hashtags used for posts and topics related to Northwest Indiana (#nwi and #nwindiana)?

Why don’t we all just stick with the efficient, memorable "#nwi" as opposed to the bloated, waste-of-space “nwindiana"?

I’d like to think of Northwest Indiana’s Twitter following as being relatively advanced. More and more individuals, groups, organizations, and businesses continue to jump on Twitter and become more connected with their constituents. Over the course of my tenure maintaining ValpoLife’s Twitter account, though, I haven’t seen anyone even address this glaring Two-Hashtag Issue. I just don’t understand why such a smart group of technology-minded people can put to waste so many characters!

We all know Twitter has a limit of 140 characters. Every time you tag something with #nwindiana instead of #nwi, you are using 6 more characters (that’s 4% of your tweet that is essentially wasted!). Every time you tag something with #nwindiana AND #nwi, you are essentially burning 10 characters of your precious characters (that’s 7%!).

As the graph shows, your messages get shorter with the larger number of characters in your hashtags. (Note: the "Both" total was calculated with a " " character.)

With every post, those are 6-10 characters that you could otherwise be using to more effectively or fully describe what it is you are trying to disseminate out to the world, or you could even leave them blank so others can quickly and effortlessly retweet or comment on your post without all that messy editing that comes along with retweeting a congested post. Let’s stop burning those empty calories!

My proposal is simple: By the end of February, let’s phase out the #nwindiana tag.

Kindly Direct Message the folks that continue to waste tweets and tell them the #nwindiana tag will soon be gone. Retweet this article around and let it be known that #nwi should be home to Northwest Indiana’s tweets.

But ValpoLife can’t do it alone. If we stop using the #nwindiana tag, but everyone else does, we’ll be running through the quad by ourselves. We don’t want to do that.

So, Northwest Indiana Twitter users, I urge you, let’s get rid of the #nwindiana tag. Let’s be more productive with our tweets.