Alright, so I am not a social media guru but I’ve had this question asked of me enough. Whenever you’re on Twitter, sometimes you will see people tweet with code like #mm or #gnu or something like that. These are called hashtags and they are a way of tagging a tweet so that people can track a conversation. Parties and events are becoming very popular on Twitter and people usually use these hashtags when replying to or participating in the event.
If you’d like to read about all the conversation related to that event, you’d go to http://search.twitter.com enter the hasthtag in the search box and it’ll bring up what everyone is saying. Here’s an example of the chatter about the inauguration.
This is great for many things:
- Good way to find a conversation you can jump in to. There are no rules about it. Anyone can tweet, attach the hashtag and be part of the conversation.
- A good way to find out what everyone is saying about one topic
- A fantastic way to find out what other topics people are talking about in real time
- Great way to find stuff to blog about
- Fun way to find people to follow
Another site you can go look at the chat trends is hashtags.org. Unfortunately their site is not very reliable and often you’ll find it down or takes forever to load.
