Why add hashtags to tweets?
So what is a hashtag?
It’s a word prefixed with a hash symbol so #hashtag, #twitter etc added normally to the end of a tweet. It’s normally used to tag a tweet or link with a topic, similar to how meta keywords used to work for search engines to tell the search engine what the page was about. Here’s a couple of examples
@Signalnoise: Wait, one of Kyle Cooper’s teachers at Yale was Paul Rand?! #FITC
@xboxer360: Dragon Age 2 Gets a Release Date and Trailer – http://bit.ly/d6xwBT #xbox #xbox360 #gaming
The first adds a hashtag of FITC which is an event called Flash in the Community, the second adds relevant tags for the console the link is about and a general gaming tag too.
What do people use them for, once I have added them?
On the main Twitter website (and many of the apps too) these hashtags are turned into links to searches, so you can click the tag and find other posts about this topic. These searches can then be added to RSS feed readers so people get all the tweets about this particular topic. Some apps such as TweetDeck allow you to add these searches so that it displays all the posts with that tag as they happen.
But surely only the really tech savvy will use this functionality then?
This may be true that only heavy twitter users or geeky types use the twitter searches or RSS feeds, however these users are also likely to be “influencers” with lots of followers or being followed by the right people, meaning that if they see your post via a hashtag then retweet it, you may find your tweet doing the rounds very quickly.
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