Twitter is filled with awesome little tricks, and I recently found a very cool one for referring to companies on Twitter. First though, lets see the existing two ways to refer to a company. First you can use the companies Twitter name for example:
I work for @bbdsoftware :)
— Robert MacLean (@rmaclean) November 29, 2012
Or your other option is to use a hashtag
So what is the new awesome trick? If the company has a stock ticker code, for example Microsoft has MSFT & Nokia has NOK then you can prefix that with $ on Twitter, i.e. $MSFT & $NOK.My mother is a happy #Bing user
— Robert MacLean (@rmaclean) November 29, 2012
I am hoping for a $NOK Lumia 920 phone :)
— Robert MacLean (@rmaclean) November 29, 2012
On the Twitter site you will note that $NOK is now a link to a search for all $NOK related items (it doesn't work on the embedded Tweet), which in many cases (like Nokia) can save you a little bit of text. For people monitoring companies social network this is also important as it is an another thing they need to monitor!
This feature is called a CTAG (maybe it isn’t - but that is the the source on the search).