CWI Media, LLC
A blog post I wrote for @businessbullpen’s Tumblr blog.
Hashtags are used to tag Tweets with a particular topic, e.g., #SEO, #marketing, #Tumblr, etc. Hashtags can be used in the text (sentence) of a Tweet or placed at the end of the Tweet.
While some hashtags like #SEO can be incorporated into a sentence, most seem to be placed at the end of a Tweet merely to add that Tweet to a bigger conversation. For example, when the tornado warnings kept so many people in Southwest Virginia up late in early May, those of us on Twitter tagged our Tweets with #vawx, which stands for “Virginia weather.” This allowed us to create a Twitter feed with only those Tweets containing that hashtag.
Twitter is searchable, and not just by #hashtags. Keywords also play a “key” role. There are two primary differences between keywords and hashtags; keywords can be more than one word (i.e., Virginia Tech) and are not preceded by a hash mark (pound sign). Hashtags are preceded by a hash mark and cannot contain spaces. If you used #Social Media, only #Social would be recognized as a hashtag. But “Social Media” is still searchable.
