This year, the ARRL will be using Twitter to promote Field Day events. According to ARRL Media and Public Relations Manager Allen Pitts, W1AGP, more and more people, both young and old, are using social networking sites -- such as Twitter and Facebook -- to keep their friends up-to-date with their latest activities. The account for ARRL’s Field Day actions with Twitter is ARRL_FD. Sign up to create your own Twitter account -- it’s free -- and follow ARRL_FD. If you already have a Twitter account, just follow us.

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets, text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers (who are known as followers). You can send these short messages by computer or even via text with your cell phone. When you receive a tweet, you can also relay it on to your own followers (called a retweet). Your followers can in turn relay it even further, getting your message spread around, growing and going.

Pitts explained that posts with #FIELDDAY (the # sign must be included) in with the message, Twitter will keep track of it: “If there is enough traffic with #FIELDDAY in the text, then major blogs and news take note of it. So by taking part in this experiment, tweeting and using the #FIELDDAY insert in with your message -- called a hashtag -- will help bring all of Field Day to the media’s attention. Social networking is new to a lot of us, but I found it is really not hard at all to learn and do. The more people we get on, the more tweeting we do, we have the wonderful opportunity to expose Amateur Radio to a new audience.”