#SOTU Tips Direct from Twitter

For all of you tweeting about the SOTU tonight, we thought you might find this official prep memo from Twitter helpful.

This year's State of the Union is sure to be one of the most tweeted-about political events of the season. While we expect the #sotu hashtag to be especially prevalent (last year the #sotu hashtag appeared in more than 80 percent of Tweets about the speech), we also will see a deeper granularity in how hashtags will track the movement of the speech.

For the first time ever, the White House has identified hashtags outlining key sections of the speech:

#jobs
#manufacturing
#energy
#education
#fairness

Twitter will be analyzing themes in the conversation and distributing the results for you to use through this Newsletter and the Twitter Blog. With your help we can make this data as representative as possible. Consider adding these hashtags to your Tweets when appropriate, and encouraging your audience to do the same. The use of hashtags in persistent on-air graphics, in particular, is a proven driver of audience engagement and will help us provide you with the most editorially-relevant measurement of reaction volume following the speech.