I wasn’t going to post here until tomorrow. I’ve been on vacation (it was wonderful), and I was enjoying one more day of blog break.

But then the earthquake happened. Yes, earthquake in D.C. I remember one other a few years ago, but that’s it, and I’ve been here more than 20 years.

So what did I do after the shaking stopped? Tried to call my husband and son. No good. Cell system in jammed. I sent both of them texts and am still waiting to hear back.

But I know all my Twitter and Facebook friends are okay. As soon as I gave up on the phone, I went to the computer. WiFi is fine. Lots of tweets about the quake. And Facebook was all abuzz.

A few years ago, I would have turned on the TV or radio. Now I don’t have TV service, and I think the only radio is in my car. I get all my news from social media. And from what I read, so do many other people.

What about you? Where did you go after the quake? Where do you get your news?

Lots of people (myself included) create lists on Twitter as as way to group those they follow, often by topic, but sometimes for other reasons.

Other users can use these lists as a resource for information, or for finding people to follow. When I told a client he could follow either the list or the individuals, he asked “why would I follow each individual?”

Good question. Following a list is easy. One click and you’re done. Set up a column in your Twitter client app, and you’re done. I told him there were two reasons to follow the individuals.

One was that he might not like every account on the list. Some people on my Small Business Resources list tweet A LOT. Maybe you wouldn’t want to follow those people. Or maybe you like the marketing/branding folks but don’t care about the small business finance people.

The other reason to follow individuals is to increase your own followers. Remember, the people on the list won’t check to see who is following the list. They are focused on who is following them. So if you follow the individuals, they might follow you back. If you are satisfied with your follower numbers, you might not care about that one.

Anyone else have pros and cons for following lists vs. people?

Hashtags are useful for following targeted topics and for grouping tweets. But can they be used to increase retweets?

In my experience they can, in two ways.

1. Some people follow hashtags, not people

For these users, if you don’t use a hashtag, your tweet will go undiscovered. So if your tweet is topical, use one or two hashtags to be seen by those people who are interested in the topic.

2. Some people routinely retweet hashtags

I discovered this while promoting my events. If I just tweeted the event, I’d get a few retweets. If I used the #dcevents hashtag, my retweets doubled, or more. Followers who rarely retweeted me would retweet the events when I used the hashtag.

Study your followers. Find out which hashtags they tend to retweet and use them.

In either scenario, don’t go overboard. I’ve seen tweets with more hashtags than content. It’s confusing and not the best use of your precious 140 characters.

Anyone want to share hashtags you always (or never) retweet?

Yesterday Hubspot published some interesting data on asking that a post be Retweeted.

Their conclusion was that posts containing “Please Retweet” or “Please RT” were significantly more likely to be retweeted than posts with out the request.

The comments on the post were interesting also. Most of the people commenting were inclined to disbelieve the statistics.

The reason I am flabbergasted is that their data contradicts what most people write about in Twitter etiquette. The general rule has been don’t include “Please Retweet,” saying that it looks desperate. I tend to agree. I will occasionally retweet posts containing the request, but generally only if it’s something I would have retweeted anyway. And I always remove the request from my Tweet.

What do you all think? Planning to give it a try? Going to stick with the general etiquette advice? I’d be interested to get a conversation going around it here.

As for me? I’m not going to add a request. For all the reasons above plus the fact that it adds a lot of characters to a 140 character post. I don’t like to waste my precious space. But maybe you can convince me otherwise.

You probably noticed that I took about a two week break from the blog. Part of that was taking a short vacation, but the rest was just needing a break. I felt like I was struggling sometimes to come up with blog posts. I took the same time off Twitter and Facebook as well.

And now I’m feeling refreshed and ready to get back into blogging and social media.

So if you feel overwhelmed or burned out occasionally, go ahead and step back for a bit. Just don’t stay away forever. We’d miss you.