I’ve been wondering for weeks what the hell was up with people throwing little number (#) signs in their tweets on twitter. I just discovered that this symbol is called a hashtag and was developed as a way of tagging the content of a tweet, so that twitter folk who don’t follow you, but are interested in that topic, can find and read your tweet.

How HashTags Work

For example, say I tweeted a link to a great article on how to earn a million dollars, if I want to make it searchable I could tweet this:

“Great article on how to make tons of $$ http://tinyurl.com/… #diy #howto”

Now someone can search on twitter or on hashtags.org for “#diy” or “#howto” and my tweet will come up! The hash mark is basically a sign to those reading the text of your tweet that those words are just tags, not necessarily the content of your tweet. However, some people do incorporate the hash mark into the tweet message content.

Hashtags are most useful if you friend @hastags. Your hashtags will then automatically be indexed with hashtags.org for others to follow and you will be able to subscribe to terms of interest. Tweets containing the terms you subscribe to will appear in your time line, even if you you don’t follow the tweet author. For example, if I tweeted the message above, anyone subscribed to #diy would automatically see my tweet in their time line.

An Example of HashTags in Action

So, lets say I am a huge Twilight fan and I want to see every tweet out there marked #twilight, I would tweet “Follow #twilight” and then I would get all of the updates tagged #twilight in my twitter time line.

Maybe I only want to see when @ChicandCharming tweets about twilight, then I would tweet “follow chicandcharming#twilight.” If you are already following @chicandcharming this would be redundant, as you already get all of her tweets!

Now, lets say that you are OVER twilight and want to unsubscribe, tweet “Leave #twilight” and you are unsubscribed.

Finally, lets say that you were never a fan of twilight, you think it is boring and you don’t ever want to hear anything about it, you can tweet “Remove #twilight” and any time someone you follow tags something with #twilight it will not appear in your time line! Note, they must actually use the # tag, it won’t weed out anything with just the word twilight.

HashTags Cliffnotes

• If you want to tag a message, to be sent to anyone subscribed to that term or tag, you tweet #tag followed by whatever it is you want to tweet. You can actually place the tag anywhere in the body of your message. You can also send out tweets to only those subscribed to a topic by beginning your tweet with #tag !
• To subscribe: Follow #tag To unsubscribe: Leave #tag
• If you want to follow what 1 person has to say on your term of interest, you would tweet Follow twittername#tag
• To block a tag from ever appearing in your timeline, even if someone you are subscribed to uses it: Remove #tag

Hashtags are also useful for when you want to append searchable keywords to your tweet that are not already in the text. Additionally, if you do a search on twitter for a keyword with a hashtag in front, your results are likely to be a bit more focused.

Image from luclatulippe.com and www.dirjournal.com