Guidelines for Weight Loss Monday’s (#WLMon) on Twitter

A lot of so-called Twitter “experts” have published “do’s and don’ts” guides for the on-line social networking service. Among the things I frequently see listed as a “don’t” is posting of your workout data (here’s an example from The Oatmeal). Quite to the contrary, I use Twitter almost exclusively to connect with running friends, and posting of workout data and race results is more than expected, it’s one of the main reasons why we are all there.

I have found the Twitter running community to be home to a huge number of very supportive, motivational, and inspirational people, many of whom I would consider to be good friends. Recently, several of us discussed the idea of starting a weight tracking group so that we could use to offer each other support as we each try to reach or maintain our respective weight goals. Rather than sign up at yet another website (I’ve already reached social media overload with the few sites I participate in), we decided to do this within Twitter itself, and this post is just a quick summary of what we plan to do in case you’d like to join.

So here’s the scoop:

1. If you’d like to join in, simply tweet your starting weight at any time along with the hashtag #WLMon.

2. Every Monday, tweet your current weight along with any change (+ or -) from the previous week. Always add the hashtag #WLMon to any tweet you want to go to the group.

3. If during the week you have any weight loss/maintenance related tweets, simply add the hashtag (#WLMon) and send it off.

4. If you reply to anyone’s #WLMon tweet, you can either include or not include the hashtag – you choose.

If you’re not familiar with hashtags, in most Twitter clients you can click on them and it will pull up all of the tweets that have used that particular tag. I use Tweetdeck, and when I click a hashtag it actually creates a unique column for that particular tag – in this way I have a way of grouping and seeing only those tweets containing the tag when they come through.

That’s really all there is to it – hopefully we can support and motivate each other to reach our weight goals for 2010. Feel free to send this post link along to anyone you think might be interested in joining – we’re all in this together!