Using Twitter Hashtags

Using Twitter Hashtags effectively requires just a little knowledge.
Here are a few tips and some insight as to why people use #hashtags.

The Basics

• What is a hashtag?

The # symbol, is usually referred to as the pound symbol, however it is also called the “Hash” symbol. A hashtag therefore is any word, phrase, or series of letters and numbers which is preceeded by a #.

A hashtag is merely a keyword, and it is denoted on Twitter like this: #hashtaghere

• Why are hashtags important?

The importance of Hashtags only comes into play when people are searching for what others are saying about a particular subject or event. I’ll show you a portion of two screenshots to illustrate the difference.

I went to http://search.twitter.com (formerly known as Summize.com) and searched for “hashtag” and then “#hashtag”. Here are the results.

Searching for the word Hashtag

Searching for the specific #hashtag

Search Results

As you can hopefully see, the use of the # symbol in the search has yielded different results.

In the first image are the results for people who where just using the word “hashtag” in their tweet, and the second image is the results for people specifically talking about the #hashtag.

Hashtags play a pretty signicant role when people are attending events, conferences, or meetups.

Using search.twitter.com during such events, and searching for the proper #hashtag, allows people to keep up with what people are saying. It also lets you discover new Twitterers who might be talking about the same thing.

Choosing the Hashtag

You might be wondering how you’ll know which word to use as the hashtag. Generally, a word or phrase is just agreed upon ahead of time by a few people and then everyone adopts it. It’s not a perfect system, but it works rather well.

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This blog post was written by Michael Bailey. Michael became interested in Social Media in the Summer of 2005 and has devoted thousands of hours towards the development of the MobaTalk Conversation Studio. He believes that the Context of Conversational data is quickly lost on the web using the currently available tools.