Social Media Tutorials 03 – What are these hashtag things on Twitter?

If you use Twitter, you’ve seen them – the number signs before words and series of words. If you don’t use Twitter yet, you’ve probably seen them on other platforms and wondered what the heck they were.

Well, here’s the secret to hashtags. On Twitter they are the key to conversations. If you want to talk about writing with other writers, you have two choices. You can friend/follow writers with similar interests. But how do you find other people like you? Hashtags are a good way to find and connect with people with similar interests.

Hashtags are also a great way to follow topics that interest you. For example, if you do a search for writing, you will find all tweets mentioning the word writing in all contexts. Including a college kid complaining about the essay they are writing for class. But if you search for #writing. The search will only bring up tweets which people marked as conversations about writing (using the hashtag).

Many groups create special hashtags for their group or event. You can tweet with other people at a conference (about the conference) by using the conference hashtag. It’s a great way to stay up-to-date on a conversation with people who are not followers.

Hashtags are also used for Twitter memes. You will recognize these by the typically long length of the hashtags and the humorous nature.

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