Twitter101: What Are Hashtags All About?

 

You finally jumped into the Twittersphere. Well, maybe "jumped" is a bit generous. Most likely you were hounded into it by a zealous friend or staffer. The pressure was on and you reluctantly caved. So now what?

You successfully loaded up a semi-presentable photo of yourself to your Twitter profile, added a few followers and even successfully updated your status into the glaring white space of the "What Are You Doing?" box.

Then you scan the updates of those folks you've deemed worthy of following.

"I ate a bagel" declares a tweet from a friend across the country. "Thank you for sharing" you think to yourself, questioning why again you're doing this.

Then you see what looks like a typo. Someone sends an update that contains the tic-tac-toe board of confusion. The pound sign. A hashtag.

What is it? And why do folks use it?

Simply put, a hashtag is a way to classify your tweet so that others who may be interested in that same topic can search for tweets relating to that topic. In the example above, the recent conference Catalyst West had a hashtag of #catwest. Anyone attending the conference or following the events via tweets can search on that hashtag and all the tweets related to that topic show up in a search.

Say you wanted to follow the tweets for an event. Where do you go to follow the conversations?

One place to search for a topic such as this conference called #catwest is at Twitter Search. You simply put in the hashtag you're looking for and up pops up the stream of tweets relating to that.

When searching for a hashtag, here are the most common questions I hear:

1. Who assigns the hashtag for an event or topic?

As far as this author knows, there is no "official" hashtag assigner. What I've observed is that if it is your event, you can make one up. Typically they are short because tweets have only 140 characters and real estate is precious. If you attend an event and no one has created one, you can just start using a hashtag of your making and hope it catches on.

1. But what if I don't know the official hashtag? 

Because Twitter is still the wild west, there is no official naming convention that would make it easy to guess at a hashtag. If the event producer is Twitter-savvy, they will announce on their conference site what the "official hashtag" to follow is. If not, you guess.

That is until last week, when a new site called Twubs was launched. It says "Hashtags Made Useful" and I must say, I liked using it because of the imprecision of hashtag assignments.

Using the example above for Catalyst West, some may use #catwest while others search #catalystwest and still others #catalystwest09. The beauty of Twubs, I found, was that if I searched for my lame guess, it still brought up the others (along the right side of the screen) under Related Twubs.

I also found it handy to have the pictures for that same event brought together, regardless of who posted them. Many folks could upload photos and as long as they contained the hashtag for that event, they were included.

But hashtags aren't only for events. They can surround topics as broad as current events or as specific as #stumin (student ministries) or #kidmin (children's ministry). The power of Twitter to bring together God-followers across the country is amazing. A new site called Twibes tries to bring together all the many categories of hashtags out there.

So there you have it. More that you ever wanted to know about Hashtags.

Now that you know a little more than when you started, how about checking out some of these sites and playing around with the little pound signs yourself.

You may surprise yourself at who you connect with.

Comments

[tony ferraro]

thanks for the twubs post in such amazing company. i am crazed to see the church connect!

[Allan W.]

Hashtags are incredibly useful - and frustrating with the space they consume. I'd really like Twitter to have a proper metadata field, or for hashtags to "act" like keywords (some Twitter apps do this somewhat). I mean, Del.icio.us does it pretty much right.

From what I understand, the 140-character limit was somewhat artificial (txts being up to 160 chrs); Twitter is probably mostly web-based now, so why force the limit?

I rarely use them unless I'm really trying to target a group (such as at #catwest, where it was really useful, even necessary). @djchuang and I were having an interesting discussion as to which hashtag would "win". Democracy (or tyranny of the influential few) at work!

[Nick Zadrozny]

Also, as many saw, we used the #catwest hash tag to show questions and comments up on the video screens with http://paratweet.com/ :)

[Dawn Carter]

Tony: Thanks for the comment. Nice useful app you got there.

Allan: How funny you discussed with DJ which hashtag would "win." We'd all be winners if someone could merge the variations for us into a master feed. In the meantime we have to get all Boolean in our search queries...

Nick: Loved seeing Paratweet in action at Catalyst West. I left a glowing comment on Cynthia Ware's writeup about Paratweet at her blog, The Digital Sanctuary.

[Jim Gray]

nicely done on explaining the hashtags...