What the Heck is a Hash Tag in Twitter?

Great question on Twitter from Sue regarding hash tags on Twitter.  Her question was: do you have to create one or does it just show up in Twitter search?

This is a fantastic question since Twitter hash tags confused me at first too!  However, once you know it, it’s actually quite easy.

Before I begin, I’ll tell you what a hash tag is. In Twitter, we’re often categorizing information naturally — we might be tweeting about a particular event, we might be discussing a common company or what not.  When we do this, we may want an easy way for people to pull up that information and follow along the conversations.  For example, when we did the Summer Speaker Series 2009, I used #sss09 to track the conversations.

People could follow along with this thread using a tool like TweetDeck or by going to the search.twitter.com website and searching it.  Here is a list of the results here.  However, funny enough… it appears that an event that occurred after mine didn’t look to see if a hash tag existed so they used the same one as I did.

A hash tag anatomy is always the number sign (or pound sign) –> #  … Followed by your keyword –> dog … To create #dog.

Now the question is, how do you set one up.  Well, here’s the fun part.  There is no setup!  Here’s what I do.

1. Check on Search.Twitter.com to see if  hash tag exists.

2. Once you find out if it exists or not (if it doesn’t, it’ll come up with no results found) then you want to just start using it and ask others to use it too.

What I do to track results is return back to Search.Twitter.com and look up the hash tag or, track the results by setting up a column in TweetDeck.

Hopefully this helps if hash tags have confused the heck out of you   Leave your other hash tag questions, tips, etc. below in the comments.

Related posts: