For those of you following IDGuardian on Twitter, you may have noticed a change in how we are posting our popular TwitterTips. We have been thrilled with the amount of “retweets” (circulating attributed postings in other Twitter feeds) our TwitterTips have earned; but after talking with our network, a change was needed.

Originally, when we went online back in September, our TwitterTips originally looked like this:

IDGuardian TwitterTip: Perform random online searches of your name in order to find out what personal information is available.

In October, the format changed to:

TwitterTip: At 18 years of age, your credit is compiled and reported to the credit reporting agencies.

Now, our TwitterTips will appear in your feeds in this fashion:

In June 2010, the FTC will enforce “Red Flag” rules, designed to prevent identity fraud. (from @IDAssistanceCTR) #creditsecurity

The previous posting is still an IDGuardian TwitterTip; but here is what you need to know about our new approach to this old favorite:

Character Conservation. If you are new to Twitter, you will know that all the postings (or tweets) are limited to 140 characters, and those 140 characters include spaces. The earlier TwitterTips with their headers used valuable characters, making it difficult for others to retweet without dramatically editing the original post. Many users were removing the header, so in “rethinking the retweet” we decided to conserve on the characters and streamline our TwitterTips.

Trackable Tweets. You may notice in the new format a pound sign connected to a term. These are known as hashtags. Hashtags are keywords used within a tweet to track it via Twitter Search. This way, by establishing a hashtag as part of a tweet or  conversation, you can create a Trending Topic on Twitter, thereby increasing visibility. At present, the hashtags we are using are:

• #onlinesecurity
• #idprotection
• #creditsecurity
• #scam

By incorporating the hashtag, we can now make it easier to track who is talking about our TwitterTips and where they are being circulated.

Keep an eye out for our TwitterTips that still carry that same reliable news or helpful insight IDGuardian is known for, just in a more compact format. Thank you for following us on Twitter and here at our blog. Feel free to leave a review for our podcast on iTunes, and continue to share with us your thoughts, opinions, and reactions to the columns featured here.

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