I spend a lot of (let’s be honest, far too much) time on Twitter, tweeting links to my own stories, guest articles on MayorWatch, stories written by friends and people I follow and a mix of jokes which probably split 70/30 between painfully unfunny and, at best, mildly amusing. (Apart from in my own head where they’re all, 100% of them, utterly hilarious.)
So with all those Twitter hours logged, you’d think I’d know how to search for a hashtag. And yet I seem to be doing something seriously wrong.
Two weeks ago, in the last newsletter I received from Sadiq Khan’s mayoral campaign, he urged supporters to take to Twitter and use the hashtag #SadiqvZac to say who they think “is fit to run London”.
Today I decided to check how that was going for him so I searched for the hashtag, carefully entering #SadiqvZac into Twitter’s search box, and then, because the result didn’t seem credible, clicking on the tag in one the few Tweets which used it.
The result still seemed pretty low so I tried the hashtag in lower case. I even tried it with and without the #.
But no matter how many times I tried and what combination of cases I used, I still only came up with a paltry EIGHT TEN (two were hiding under a tiny piece of lint on my monitor) results.
Given one of those is directed to me rather than to Sadiq or Zac and two seem to be complaints about the presumptive nature of issuing a hashtag before you’re selected as the candidate, that would be embarrassing.
So please, can someone who knows how to use Twitter better than I obviously do, carry out a quick search and tell me how many hundreds or thousands of Tweets are out there tagged with #SadiqvZac because all I’m seeing is this:
