People who know me well know one thing about me: I’m not a fan of football. So much so that one time, when I guy I didn’t know for very long asked me over Facebook if I’d be keen to join him in a game of 5-a-side, an old school friend of mine joined in in the comments in what can only be described as “hysterical laughing”…
With World Cup fever taking over these past couple of months, I got in the habit of muting WC-related hashtags on Twitter. I did the maths following on from the final and found out that I’d muted 50(!) of them altogether (you can see the full list below). Looking back, I learnt 3 things…
1) Football fans love their consistency
It irks me when you go to an event and people on Twitter use 2 or 3 different hashtags for the same thing – e.g. #EventName, #EventName2014, #ENAbbreviated, etc. etc. It sucks because it’d be good to have all the event-related tweets all in one place, assigned to one hashtag. Well, with football, that ain’t gonna happen…
The Germany vs Brazil game saw #BRA, #BRAGER, #BRAvGER, #BRAvsGER, #BrazilvsGermany and #GERBRA all in use as once. Football fans: WTF? Seriously, you guys needs to decide on a consistent hashtag and go nuts on that one.
2) Muting some hashtags is a tricky business (if they overlap with other topics)
The mighty #CRO… Conversion Rate Optimisation or Croatia? Suffice to say I left that one unmuted (or thinking about it, I could’ve just muted it for a period of time – e.g. one month, instead of forever – but never mind)…
3) No matter how much you mute…
…You’ll never be able to stop some tweets – especially those where people don’t use a hashtag.
As for the full list? Here you go…
- #2014WorldCup
- #ARGvsBEL
- #ARGvsGER
- #ARGvsNED
- #AUSvNED
- #AUSvsNED
- #bbcworldcup
- #BELUSA
- #BELvsUSA
- #BRA
- #BRAGER
- #BRAvGER
- #BRAvsCHI
- #BRAvsCOL
- #BRAvsCRO
- #BRAvsGER
- #BRAvsNED
- #BrazilvsGermany
- #COLvsURU
- #COLvURU
- #CRCvsGRE
- #ENG
- #EnglandvsUruguay
- #FifaWorldCup
- #FIFAWorldCupBrazil
- #FRAGER
- #GERARG
- #GERBRA
- #GermaniaArgentina
- #GermanyvsArgentina
- #GERvARG
- #GERvsALG
- #GoUSA
- #HONvENG
- #ITA
- #NEDARG
- #NEDvsARG
- #NEDvsMEX
- #NZLvENG
- #SEOWorldCup
- #USAvBEL
- #USAvPOR
- #USAvsBEL
- #USAvsGhana
- #USAvsPOR
- #WC2014Brasil
- #worldcup
- #WorldCup2014
- #WorldCupFinal
- #WorldCupOpeningCeremony
God bless the beautiful game. Less so my abused Twitter stream…
[Deflated football image credit – Rob Gallop]
Emma
July 15, 2014 at 9:09 pmYou can mute hashtags? Is this available via the twitter site? Please tell me how. I think there are a few I’ll need to block in future – ha!
Steve
July 15, 2014 at 10:38 pmHey dude. I think Twitter introduced it recently, but I mostly use Tweetbot, which definitely has it. You can mute users, too (treated differently to blocking). Hope that helps 🙂
Emma
July 18, 2014 at 2:43 pmBe sure to do a handy “How To” guide and get it ranking!