If you’re new to Twitter, you may have NO idea how to approach it, but one of the best ways to focus and find a “home” on Twitter is by using and searching for hastags. Hashtags make sense of the “cocktail party” that is Twitter!

Imagine being at a cocktail party where everyone is talking at once (sounds like a typical party, eh?) – it’s confusing and overwhelming.

However, if you could zone in on all of the people talking about a subject that interests you it might be more interesting and you would meet and connect with interesting people. Make sense? That’s a hashtag! Your way of organizing the chaos!

So, how do I use a hashtag?

Let’s say I’m interested in #hairstyles. The first thing I would do is a basic Twitter search on the term itself so I can see if someone’s already created a related hash tag.

After going over a few pages of results, there are plenty of tweets with the term “hairstyle” in them, however I’m not finding any that have included a hash tag.

So now if I want to create a community of people who will share their love of hairstyles, I can create my own hash tag.

Keep in mind that the tag will use up some of your 140-character limit, so you’re going to want to keep your tweet fairly short, and yet create interest.   For example,  an intro #hairstyle tweet might go something like this

Check out the #hairstyle on Victoria Beckham at the British Fashion Awards 2011 in London! Love it or hate it? http://goo.gl/Rs4Ws

Hopefully this will start a conversation and get the information moving. It will also connect you with people who have similar interests.

Use Search as a way to find hashtags that are already happening that interest you or connect to your business.

Think all of this is silly? Or just for advertising? Then check out Project EPIC – based in Boulder this project is a “multi-disciplinary, multi-university, multi-lingual research effort to support the information needs by members of the public during times of mass emergency. In this age of social media, we bring our behavioral and technical knowledge of “computer mediated communication” to the world of crisis studies and emergency response.”

How awesome is that to track crisis and emergencies through social medial. I’m sure you’ve already caught a glimpse of top news stories breaking via twitter or Facebook before they even hit the main stream media. Who knows where this information stream will stop and you, and your business can be a part of it.  They use “Tweak the Tweet” to directly track data:

Tweak the Tweet is a hashtag-based syntax to help direct Twitter communications for more efficient data extraction for those communicating about disaster events. Use requires modifications of Tweet messages to make information pieces that refer to #location, #status, #needs, #damage and several other elements of emergency communications more machine readable.

Hopefully these tips give you a better guideline on how to use the “Twitter” stream better for fun or profit! Remember to have a conversation and not just tweet out ads! It’s good netiquette!

Posted on Wednesday, November 30th, 2011 at 4:58 pm in Social Media   |  RSS feed Comments and pings are currently closed.