...as Led Zeppelin once sang.

It's been a few days since I've had the opportunity to sit down and write a new blog post.  The longest gap I've ever left.

As part of my day job I deal with acronyms all the time;  OHLC, MACD, ROCE, CROCI, RSI, PEG and EPS are but a few of them. (If you're clever you can work out what industry my job is related to now)

Using Twitter has opened up a whole new world of acronyms for me to learn; the world of the hash-tag acronym.

Why use acronyms for hash-tags? Simply it helps when you're trying to cram as much info into the 140 character tweet limit as possible.  Even your twitter bio has to adhere to this as well.

You come across all sorts of them while traversing twitter.  The other day I found a large number of people using #YNWA.  It helped that some also were using #LFC or #Liverpool otherwise I don't think I would have deciphered it.   It stands for You'll Never Walk Alone which is the chosen song of Liverpool Football Club supporters.

For a long time I myself used #QOTD, which is Quote Of The Day.

So I thought I'd use this Monday blog  to share some of them with you and save you the time of looking them up and maybe help you out with your posts.

#RT - ReTweet - use if you want people to specifically retweet the post.  I don't know how much notice is taken of this hash-tag to be honest.

#FF - Follow Friday, people use this in their posts to try and get more followers on, yes you guessed it, Fridays.

#F4F - Follow for Follow, people us this to indicate that if you follow them they will follow you.

#TFB - Team Follow Back, a more organised attempt at getting people more followers.

All of these can be use to garner you more followers.  I never actually used on of these instead I used the more fully formed #FollowBack.  But I am thinking of changing to #F4F on my Bio to free up a few characters.

Speaking of followers while I was sleeping I reached a major personal milestone.  I topped 2000 followers on Twitter!  Go me!


So those acronyms are generically useful here's a few that the writers among you might find more to your liking.

There's a few simple ones like:

#YA - Young Adult

#NA - New Adult

#MG - Middle Grade

Then you have more complex specific ones like:

#CR4U  -  Clean Writing For You.  I am fairly sure it's used by Clean Indie Reads to indicate books that do not use profanity or erotica.

#BYNR - Book Your Next Read.  Used to indicate a book that you used mark to read after the novel you are currently reading.

#IAN1 - Independent Author Network.  Used to indicate your affiliation to the network.

#ASMSG - Author Social Media Support Group.  I think their purpose is clear from the name.  I probably should join this group myself.

#MT4A - Marketing Tips for Authors. This comes from the marketingtips4authors blog by Clive Eaton.

There is one oft used hash-tag whose explanation still eludes me and that is:

#ArtKNB

So if you know what this means please let me know.

25/03 Update - I now know that this means Art Knows No Bounds.

Phil