It happens every Tuesday, yet how many of us really know what it is for?

#charitytuesday was the idea of Lovebox (http://www.lovebox.org.uk) who describe themselves as ‘your digital wristband to help raise money and awareness for charities around the world via the web’. They saw an opportunity for twitter to help good causes and so #charitytuesday was born – but what is it?

Twitter uses hashtags (#) to index content and this one is for the charity sector, #charitytuesday. It is a great way for both charities and their supporters to promote their causes. For a charity, it is an ideal way to launch a campaign and get people talking about their work. For supporters, it’s a great way to get others interested and help to raise the profile of your chosen charity. Encouraging conversations will increase the chance of new people becoming supporters.

#charitytuesday now trends on twitter (popular topics being talked about). To trend on twitter you need people to tweet using your hashtag. The more people the better it works, it will not work so well if you have less people tweeting more often.

What not to do – according to twitter doing one or more of the following can land you in trouble and even get your account suspended.

• Adding one or more topic/hashtag to an unrelated Tweet in an attempt to gain attention in search.
• Repeatedly tweeting the same topic/hashtag without adding value to the conversation in an attempt to get the topic trending/trending higher.
• Tweeting about each trending topic in turn in order to drive traffic to your profile, especially when mixed with advertising.
• Listing the trending topics in combination with a request to be followed.
• Tweeting about a trending topic and posting a misleading link to something unrelated.­­

Now you have some guidelines for the use of #charitytuesday. Will you be using twitter to help a good cause?

Do you get the most out of #FollowFriday?

I attended a networking meeting this week where we were all talking about social media and how we use it for our businesses. This is a matter very close to my heart, I use it, I love it and I get work from it.

One of the things that my table started to discuss was #FollowFriday, and this is where my rant starts. It's a fantastic idea, recommend people and companies who have helped you over the past week. So why do so many people just list a whole load of other people/businesses? One of the reasons was - that's the way that everyone else does it, is there another way to do this? Often the people who list a whole load of companies one after the other are just listing their twitter friends, wanting to promote them. We as the viewer have no idea why they are being recommended or if it worth us following them.

The best way of promoting a friend or company that you have received a great service from is to tell all your twitter followers why they should follow them too.

The advice I gave to my table was, if you are going to #ff a company, do it one company at a time and make sure that you give a reason on why you are recommending them, this way others reading your tweet can make an informed decision about wether they should follow them or not.

Personally, I always skim over the lists of #ff as they are informative and hold no value to me - do you feel the same?