Wednesday, April 15, 2009

How to Use a Hashtag
(and what in the world is one?)



by Katherine Huske

When Did Hashtags Gain Popularity?
Hashtags were popularized during the San Diego forest fires in 2007 when Nate Ritter used the hashtag "#sandiegofire" to identify his updates related to the disaster.

What is a Hashtag?
Hashtags were developed as an easy means to create "groupings" on Twitter.

How To Use Hashtags
Using hashtags is a way to add additional context and metadata to your tweets. You create a hashtag by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. Easy as that!

How can I Track Hashtags?
You can go to hashtags.org and see real-time tracking of Twitter hashtags. Or you can load a Tweet Deck and use the filter to pull the hashtags you are interested in. You can also Opt-in and follow @hashtags to have your hashtags tracked and see real time hashtag activity. It’s amazing site.



Twemes offers real-time tracking without the necessity of following a specific Twitter account.

How To Be A Smarty Pants Using Hashtags

1. Follow @hashtags on Twitter. They will follow you back automatically, and your hashtags will be tracked.

2. Start using hashtags in your tweets, preceding key words. Research first, to find out if the subject you're tweeting already has an established hashtag.

3. You can track other tweets on the subjects you're interested in (ie: those containing the appropriate hashtags) by browsing/searching at Hashtags.org or TwitterGroups. You can set it up with RSS feeds as well.


Follow me on Twitter @WebAdvocate... and add a hashtag #huske. : )

1 comment:

sandy said...

Thanks Katherine. This will be very useful!