Making Use of Twitter’s Hashtag ‘ # ‘

Hashtag…sounds like something out of the 60’s that a certain group of people may have been overly familiar with.  Today, however, the # — hashtag is a very important Twitter trending tool.

When you tweet about something important to your business, using a hashtag in that tweet will take you beyond your followers to the Twitterverse where other Tweeps search for content, connections and trending topics.

For instance,  I went up to the search bar in Twitter and put #leadgeneration and a page worth of tweets popped up for me to review where other put in their tweet #leadgeneration.  Because I want to follow that hashtag, I saved it as a search.  Now all I have to do is go to my saved searches and click on that when I want to see what is trending in lead generation.

There are free apps that will do this too.  A simple one that I have saved to my bookmark bar is www.hashtags.org.  What I like about Hashtags.org is that they have a trending graph attached to the page so you can see how that topic is trending within a span of time.

Hashtag Tips:

1. Don’t go hashtag crazy, tweeps!  A couple of hashtags in a tweet will be fine, but tagging every word is just annoying.
2. Hashtags make an excellent event tracker.  Come up with a unique hashtag for your meeting or event then encourage people to tweet with that tag.  At the end of the event you will see how your event trended with the participants.  Very cool!
3. Twitter has a great tutorial on their site for hashtag use: https://support.twitter.com/articles/49309-what-are-hashtags-symbols

So, if you are looking for content ideas, or scouring the web for competitive data or just really interested in a topic within the Twitterverse, hashtags are the way to go.  Simple, useful and maybe a great way to connect with thought leaders on the topics that interest you most.