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.
This is good commentary from Marco Arment, the Lead Developer of Tumblr, on some of the reasons why you should think twice before using URL shorteners.
Digg has apparently been a URL-shortener recently, but they’ve just angered a lot of people by changing the behavior of their shortened URLs to redirect visitors to a Digg page instead of the typical and expected link-shortener behavior of redirecting to the target page.
Shorteners are convenient, but they create a number of significant problems such as this.
Do you trust that shortener to be operational in a few years when you’re going back through your archives and looking for that one page that you blogged about? How about that article you short-linked from Twitter three weeks ago? Will your shortener still work? Will they still redirect for free, or will they force you through an interstitial ad page like Digg has effectively done here?
By depending solely on the whims, uptime, financial viability, and business decisions of a middleman, you’re dramatically reducing the durability and longevity of a link that you’re publishing.
And that’s just one of the many problems with link shorteners. They also have negative implications for your readers and search engines.
Use them only when necessary, only when links are unimportant and don’t need to be permanent, and only from shorteners that you trust to be in business and non-annoying for a while. Digg may be in business for a bit, but I’d never trust them not to be annoying. Personally, I go with Bit.ly when I need a shortener, but I minimize such occasions.
BTW, I personally go with Bit.ly as well when I do use URL shorteners.
