Twitter

Twitter is a quickly growing online social networking site where people send out "tweets" from their personal accounts and their "followers" get to read the messages. The format is often called micro-blogging, but it is also somewhat akin to mass emailing. The strength of Twitter lies in the ability to re-tweet a message, giving the sender an unlimited audience size.

ONS maintains two accounts on Twitter, OncologyNursing and ONSmark.

• OncologyNursing is our main feed in which news about ONS, such as conference dates, upcoming CNE opportunities, or new publication content, is tweeted. OncologyNursing's tweets aim to bring the reader back to the ONS website, ONS Connect, the RE:Connect blog, or other online content posted by ONS.
• ONSmark is a feed run by medical librarian Mark Vrabel. Mark's approach is a member-benefit one. He answers questions that oncology nurses post on Twitter, provides content when requested, or finds sources of information to support a discussion taking place on the site. Many of his tweets pertain to the accomplishments and activities of individual ONS members, linking to local newspaper coverage, university publications, and other types of online releases. Mark has received positive feedback from oncology nurses on Twitter and has become an active and trusted member of the online community.

Hashtags

Hashtags are words in a tweet that have the # symbol before them. A follower of OncologyNursing or ONSmark may see #ONS, #cancer, or #nursing used either within or at the end of a tweet.

Hashtags make it easy for a reader to find specific content. If you search Twitter for #ONS, a listing of tweets with that hashtag will appear. Similarly, if you typed in #cancer, ONS tweets and any others that contained the #cancer hashtag would appear. In addition, many third-party applications, like TweetDeck, let you narrow searches by hashtags without having to use search.twitter.com.