If you're new to Twitter, you can feel inundated by the titbits of people's lives streaming by (particularly if you have found a considerable number of folks to "follow" already). By this time you have read heaps of "Tweets" and clicked the assorted links people have posted, but you could be pondering what those hashtags are about. You know, the phrases or words bust together after a symbol.
Well here's a rationalization of the Twitter hashtags (no geek-speak used) :
Fundamentally, they are a way of organising info and making it easy for folk to find what they are searching for on Twitter. It's a bit like categorizing your recipe box stews, cookies, cakes, secretBBQsauces, for example. And so on. Etc. So if you see somebody sticking startrek at the end of their tweet, they're just letting folks know their comment or link belongs in the Star Trek section of their Twitter "recipe box."
Twitter hashtags that don't seem sensible?
What if you see somebody using a tag and can't, for the life of you, figure out what it's in reference to? You can either file it into the 'how crucial can it be anyway? ' camp, or you can check it out to discover. Sites like whatthetrend.com and tagal.us can show you what hashtags are being used (or have been utilized during the past) and what they mean.
Why would you want to use hashtags?
Ahh, the big question. What is in it for you? Can't you tweet on Twitter just fine without throwing hashtags into your already limited writing space? Sure you can. But just in case you want to try them out, here are a pair reasons:
Fundamentally, hash tags make it less complicated for people to find your tweets. There are all sorts of search sites out there that help connect Twitter users. Let's say you're a fantasy fiction fan who can't get enough of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and other hopeful fiction stories, and you wish to meet other Twitter users with the same interest. If you have ever tried to search for "fantasy" online, you know you're as certain to get fantasy football sites as you are to find sites dedicated to the genre (and we won't even get into the other "fantasies" folk talk about online). Now if you head over to a Twitter search site such as twitterfall.com or search.twitter.com and type in fantasy, in contrast to just "fantasy," you'll only get tweets from people who've tagged their posts fantasy. I can't guarantee that you won't still find some, uhm, questionable tweets that way, but I have had miles better luck than by simply searching fantasy (the football people usually use the football hash tag).
Also, if you were writing about Harry Potter books and it was not natural to utilize the word fantasy in the sentence, you could tag it with the fantasy hashtag at the end, and folk could still find your tweet by searching for fantasy.
The simple way to use Twitter hashtags
OK, you are sold on them now. Or at a minimum, you are thinking of trying hashtags a few times. How do you use them?
It's pretty easy. For obvious ones, just add yourtag somewhere in the Tweet (folks frequently put them at the end, but there are no rules). If you aren't sure what the most popular hashtag convention is, you can check the search sites I mentioned above to see what people Tweeting in that area are using (since space is tight, folk sometimes go for short tags).
You can also launch your own. Perhaps you are talking about a new event, meetup, convention, etc. And part of the reason you are tweeting is to advertise it. You can announce it into existence to tell others from the event, meetup, for example. What the official hashtag is going to be.
i.e. On Twitter, you may post:
Portland Science Fiction Lovers Meetup members, let's categorize our tweets with the PdxSFMeet hashtag.
Extremely easy! Just play around on Twitter and with the search sites , and you'll get the hang of hashtags in almost no time.
Well here's a rationalization of the Twitter hashtags (no geek-speak used) :
Fundamentally, they are a way of organising info and making it easy for folk to find what they are searching for on Twitter. It's a bit like categorizing your recipe box stews, cookies, cakes, secretBBQsauces, for example. And so on. Etc. So if you see somebody sticking startrek at the end of their tweet, they're just letting folks know their comment or link belongs in the Star Trek section of their Twitter "recipe box."
Twitter hashtags that don't seem sensible?
What if you see somebody using a tag and can't, for the life of you, figure out what it's in reference to? You can either file it into the 'how crucial can it be anyway? ' camp, or you can check it out to discover. Sites like whatthetrend.com and tagal.us can show you what hashtags are being used (or have been utilized during the past) and what they mean.
Why would you want to use hashtags?
Ahh, the big question. What is in it for you? Can't you tweet on Twitter just fine without throwing hashtags into your already limited writing space? Sure you can. But just in case you want to try them out, here are a pair reasons:
Fundamentally, hash tags make it less complicated for people to find your tweets. There are all sorts of search sites out there that help connect Twitter users. Let's say you're a fantasy fiction fan who can't get enough of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and other hopeful fiction stories, and you wish to meet other Twitter users with the same interest. If you have ever tried to search for "fantasy" online, you know you're as certain to get fantasy football sites as you are to find sites dedicated to the genre (and we won't even get into the other "fantasies" folk talk about online). Now if you head over to a Twitter search site such as twitterfall.com or search.twitter.com and type in fantasy, in contrast to just "fantasy," you'll only get tweets from people who've tagged their posts fantasy. I can't guarantee that you won't still find some, uhm, questionable tweets that way, but I have had miles better luck than by simply searching fantasy (the football people usually use the football hash tag).
Also, if you were writing about Harry Potter books and it was not natural to utilize the word fantasy in the sentence, you could tag it with the fantasy hashtag at the end, and folk could still find your tweet by searching for fantasy.
The simple way to use Twitter hashtags
OK, you are sold on them now. Or at a minimum, you are thinking of trying hashtags a few times. How do you use them?
It's pretty easy. For obvious ones, just add yourtag somewhere in the Tweet (folks frequently put them at the end, but there are no rules). If you aren't sure what the most popular hashtag convention is, you can check the search sites I mentioned above to see what people Tweeting in that area are using (since space is tight, folk sometimes go for short tags).
You can also launch your own. Perhaps you are talking about a new event, meetup, convention, etc. And part of the reason you are tweeting is to advertise it. You can announce it into existence to tell others from the event, meetup, for example. What the official hashtag is going to be.
i.e. On Twitter, you may post:
Portland Science Fiction Lovers Meetup members, let's categorize our tweets with the PdxSFMeet hashtag.
Extremely easy! Just play around on Twitter and with the search sites , and you'll get the hang of hashtags in almost no time.
About the Author:
Stephen Willis writes about different social advertising strategies you will learn to uncover the rest of his ideas that are directly about Twitter marketing and how to add Twitter followers as well as new tricks with Twitter software such as TweetAdder.
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