Hashtags, What are They and Why Use Them?

Friday, November 12th, 2010

hashtags Hashtags, What are They and Why Use Them?

Are you looking for a way to use Twitter as a source for traffic to your website? There are several things you can do to increase your efforts, but in this post I’m going to talk about #Hashtags and why they are important. You may not have heard this term before, but if you’re using Twitter on a regular basis you’ve no doubt seen them.

Hash tags are important because they make your posts more relevant and easy to find. Grouping your tweets into like categories and lists makes your content that much more search engine friendly and therefore that much more useful for you and your followers.

What Are Hashtags?

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. Much like, “tags”, they give Twitter the ability to better group subjects. You can add hash tags to your tweets a # in front of your keyword or key phrase. ex: #socialmedia.

How Do I find Popular Hashtags?

Two good resources for finding hashtags that are relevant to your post/ niche are Twitter Search and Hashtags.org.

Twitter Search – (search.twitter.com) – Twitter search is a good way of seeing what is popular on Twitter right now. Here you can see the most popular trending topics. Today’s top 3 – #iamspartacus , #amanshouldnot , #edamame89.

Hastags.org – (hashtags.org) – Hashtags.org will help you to determine if the hashtag you are looking to go with is relevant or not. Here you can see just how popular the trend you are seeking out is. Complete with real time data and tweet charting you can determine if the hashtag you are using to garner more traffic is hot or not.

Using hash tags will help to get you retweeted as you will be easier to find for those people out there who share the same interests. Be sure to be vigilant and follow the emerging trends. Pay attention to your niche and retweet others who are in the same niche as you. This will help to build relationships within the Twitter community and help define you as an authority in your online community. Hashtags will help these people find you.

Happy Tweeting folks

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About Me: Nate Balcom is a web designer and social media guru with over 11 years of experience in the web industry. He specializes in web design and development, SEO and social networking. You can follow him on Twitter here.