Using Twitter Hashtags: Popular Hashtags and
Hashtag Search
What are hashtags?
Initially, hashtags
(words preceded by a # in Twitter, eg # blog) were used to identify the subject
to which belonged a tweet. These are
actually kind of keywords that highlight the main theme of your message. They are differentiated from other words in
your tweet with the # symbol at the front of the word. The hashtag is created by adding a hash/pound
sign # before the keyword like this:
# Marketing
The reader side, this
allows # to targeted searches. To
receive information on a specific topic, such as # ecology, but from all
twitters on the planet and not that of the people you follow. You can search the word # ecology. It will cross all the tweets of the world
including # ecology.
Hashtags are often used
by event organizers to keep all the tweets related to them as a single stream.
It can therefore take the name of the event in question or place an example.
Using hashtags is a great
way to expand the range of your Tweets, because hashtags are spreading quickly
enough and that Twitter users spend a lot of time looking for Hashtags of
tweets posted by people they do not follow.
There are already many
hashtags and you can use them to excess but I suggest you be careful to select
your keywords as their use must be consistent with the content you offer, you
should not use the popular hashtags in your Tweets for the sole purpose of
appearing at the top of search results from Twitter.
So what existing hashtag
can you use?
This will depend on the
theme of your site / blog and why you use Twitter. For example, you just ate a good pizza in
Paris and therefore you tweet the link to the pizzeria. You add the hashtags Paris and pizza and the
people who search for information via the hashtag will fall on this tweet.
Several sites like Twubs,
a directory of hashtags, or What the Trend, a Wiki for hashtags can be used to
better find words that make the most sense for your tweets. Have a look at the hashtags used by your followers
on Twitter and look to see which tweets they are associated.
How to create your own
hashtags?
Before creating your own
hashtags, the first thing to do is decide what keywords you will use. Use keywords easy to read but mostly as short
as possible. Remember that Twitter is
limited to 140 characters per tweet, it would be a shame to have half your
tweet occupied by your hash tag.
If you are fairly well
referenced from your tweets on Twitter, then you may see that other people
start to use them. This is just a little
warning because you will start to lose visibility if people begin to use your
hash tags in greater numbers.
You can follow hashtags
using the Twitter search engine:
http://search.twitter.com
You can monitor who uses
your hashtags or those of interest in real time and subscribe to the RSS feed
of results. You can use tools like
Monitter and TweetGrid for visualizing searches hashtag on Twitter.
