Twitter Tips: How And Why To Use Hashtags (#)

I would like to thank CG Lynch with CIO for this posting
Guest Blog By C.G. Lynch
Posted on Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford

Tweet This

While you can use Twitter's search tool to find specific people, companies, and their messages ("tweets") on the service, Hashtags allow users to sort topics into useful categories to revisit later.

If you've spent any time on Twitter, you've probably seen a hashtag before. A "#" symbol sets off a hashtag. For instance, if you wrote a tweet about Google, it might look like this:

Here's a look at how to utilize Hashtags to organize information that you contribute and consume on Twitter. As the tweets pile up, the extra time you take to thoughtfully categorize your tweets with a hashtag will help the greater Twitter community (and you individually) make the most of the service.

The story behind Hashtags

Twitter (the company) didn't create hashtags. The Twitter community's early adopters came up with the idea to put a "#" in front of topics to add context to tweets. The tag would also help filter and sort them out for future readers.

According to a Twitter fan website, the hashtags achieved significant notoriety with Twitter users in 2007 during the San Diego fires, when users designated their tweets with "#sandiegofires."

The trend to use hashtags led to the community-driven site hashtags.org, where a semi-official index of Twitter's hashtags now resides. To access the site, Twitter users merely need to opt-in (for free) by following @hashtags on Twitter.

If you're writing a tweet about a topic you think might have a unique hashtag assigned to it, you can visit hashtags.org to find it.

When you arrive at the site, choose "Tags" on the right-side menu. After the menu drops down, choose "directory."

Hashtags are listed alphabetically, but the directory won't be helpful unless you have a lot of time. It's jammed with obscure-looking hashtags (many are acronyms). As a result, you might have better luck searching the site for your hashtag of choice.

Say, for instance, that you want to assign a tag to a new product that Google released. To find the official hashtag, type "Google" into Hashtag.org's search bar. It will return results with a list of Google-related hashtags.

The site also keeps analytics for popular tags, showing recent messages in which people used the tag, the people who tweeted it, and related tags.

How Hashtags Are Born

The Twitter community organically and collectively decides what a hashtag should be as it pertains to a certain topic. Third-party sites, such as tagalus and HashDictionary allow Twitter users to define hashtags. HashtagNation facilitates discussions around how certain hashtags should be defined and formed.

All of these user-generated sites have drawbacks. For one, they often fail to return definitions for common hashtags on Twitter. This could be due to the fact that some are really obvious — if you type #facebook into tagulus, for instance, no results appear, as no one bothered to take the time to note that it would be used for a tweet about the social network.

Secondly, because multiple dictionaries chronicle Twitter hashtags, definitions for the same hashtag can vary.

Use Twitter Search to Find Hashtags

As Twitter hashtags became more popular, Twitter integrated them into its search tool. You can search for a hashtag in two ways.

The first: If you perform an advanced search, under the "Words" section, you can search for a hashtag.

Or, you can simply use Twitter's main search bar (which they recently made available on people's home pages), and put a "#" symbol in front of your hashtag.

Whichever method you decide, Twitter will return back results with tweets where users employed the hashtag. The upside to an advanced search is that you can define dates, so you don't return hashtags since the beginning of Twitter time (unless, of course, that's what you want).

Use Hashtags Judiciously

Hashtags can be overused. Chris Messina, a San Francisco-bases social media consultant (who was credited as first formulating the hashtag idea in his blog), noted some of the drawbacks in a post about how to make the most of hashtags.

"Already it's been made clear to me that the use of hashtags can be annoying, adding more noise than value," Messina wrote. "Some people just don't like how they look. Others feel that they encumber a simple communication system that should do one thing and one thing well."

As a result, he said users should make use of hashtags sparingly and only when they bring additional context to a tweet that would otherwise be absent. For instance, take these examples:

"@google gave a nice presentation. #CIOconference."

That tweet, with the hashtag, would provide better context than:

"@google gave a nice presentation."

In this case, the writer of the tweet informs people that his message is meant within the context of a conference he is attending. The benefit: his followers do not need to read past tweets in his Twitter stream to find out where he is or what he means.

My Two Cents

Twitter's hashtagging system remains a nascent form of organizing the Twitter world. Messina's contention that they should be used sparingly is well-taken. Hashtags have largely been employed by Twitter's first adopters, and their overuse has two unfortunate consequences.

First, hashtags can give Twitter an insular feel that will detract people from staying on the service, as evidenced by Twitter's poor retention rate of new users (60 percent bail not long after joining, according to recent Nielsen research). Second, it's presumptuous (and ironic, considering Twitter power users' championing of social technologies) for these folks to assume they know the best way to organize the service before more average Joe Web-Users have their say.

© 2008 CXO Media Inc.

 

Get IT Expediter by eMail

Tweet This

Twitter Tips: How to Write Better Tweets

Guest Blog by C.G. Lynch, CIO, CXO Media Inc
Original Post on CIO, Guest post on Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford

Tweet This

Twitter's growing popularity has yielded one unusual result: It has exposed the frailty of writing skills in the business world. You can fudge bad writing in a 20-slide presentation, but not in a 140-character tweet. From abbreviation-laden tweets with no discernible value, to tweets that fail to compel followers to click through on a link, examples abound. The process of constructing a good Twitter message takes careful thought, time and analysis.

More Twitter Tips on CIO.com

Twitter Etiquette: Five Dos and Don'ts

Twitter Tips: How to Safely Blend the Personal and the Professional

How and Why to Launch a Business Presence on Twitter

Clearly, the 140-character limit adds a degree of difficulty for people who already struggle with writing for less restrictive, more long-form friendly mediums, such as e-mail or blogs.

While we failed to find a panacea for constructing the perfect tweet — since the "perfect tweet" largely depends on your audience, your profession, and how you use Twitter — we compiled some guidelines from industry analysts and people who tweet uncommonly well.

Avoid Abrevs

Every day, we all receive work e-mails that are littered with improper grammar, spelling and all-lowercase letters. Given how many e-mails most of us receive in a day, such messages become, at best, an unwelcome sight, and, at worst, disrespectful of our time.

Twitter is no different. Some people follow thousands of other people on Twitter, populating their streams (home pages) with, in some cases, hundreds of tweets a minute. Obviously, people will skip over sloppy tweets, or trivial tweets, because they simply don't have the time.

"If you sound like a 13-year-old in an instant message conversation, that's not going to make people want to read your [Twitter] messages," says Susan Daffron (@susandaffron), president of Logical Expressions, a company that helps people self-publish books.

As your user-base diversifies to include people from different backgrounds, you should avoid abbreviations unless it's absolutely necessary, says Laura Fitton (@pistachio), who runs Pistachio Consulting, a firm that helps companies utilize Twitter.

"I generally go out of my way to avoid abbreviations," she says. "There are so many abbreviations you really can't always assume people will know what they are."

Twitter power users can be particular offenders with regards to that rule. Despite the fact that Twitter's user base has broadened substantially during the past six months, the majority of its users descend from a technical background. Depending on how your follower list has diversified, people might not know a lot of the Twitter lingo.

"I had people asking me what are these "#" signs," Daffron says, referring to Hashtags, which Twitter users employ to categorize topics, such as #sanfrancisco. "By writing things that are more obscure to new users, you essentially block them out."

Take Your Time

Twitter allows you to publish information instantly. The open field to tweet a message sits in your web-browser or in an app on your desktop. Since it's such a short message, the natural inclination is to post away without much thought. Much like you'd proofread an important e-mail message, you should consider sitting on a Tweet, Fitton says.

"Don't feel shy that, even though they're short, they [tweets] can be a lot work," Fitton says. "If you take your time, you will most likely put more thought into it. Thoughtful tweets are more likely to be appreciated."

Due to the fact a tweet must measure 140 characters, a quick writing job combined with lack of context can create misunderstandings. If you take time to not only construct the tweet, but also analyze your audience to see how it might be received, you can avoid upsetting people, Fitton says.

Tweeting Links: Headlines Matter

On Twitter, people often tweet links to their own published work, or articles that they have found relevant. In fact, so many people tweet links now that it requires a lot of work to get people to click on them. As a result, you must have a headline that sets your Tweet apart for the other stories of the day, says Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd), a social media analyst who writes the /message blog

"It could be humorous or topical," he says. "But you also must pare down to the absolute minimum."

One key differentiator can be pulling a quote from a piece that might entice people to read it. For instance, if everyone knows the general news of the day on a certain topic, tweeting an article with a general headline on the topic ("Democrats Reach 60 Seats in Senate") might not be as compelling as a new quote from President Obama or a Senator. In other words, assume people already read the nuts-and-bolts news story that first hit the wire, and show them why you read something that has greater depth or value. This approach also shows what about the article stuck out the most for you.

On Pistachio's website, a guest blogger, Marshall Thompson, published a helpful guide, seven steps to writing a successful Twitter headline. In the piece, he includes the following guidelines: keep it short, no puns, use keywords, use hashtags, don't consolidate stories (one tweet per story), link directly to story (not home page — don't be a page-view monger), and don't use subheads.

Learn from Past Tweets

Twitter's web-based version, and its ecosystem of apps such as TweetDeck, track every time your Twitter handle appears in a tweet. After you tweet a link or make a statement, watch how your followers receive it and whether they retweet it.

In addition to following your retweets on Twitter's search tool, other tools help you track the pervasiveness of the links you share. TweetDeck users utilize bit.ly to shorten URLs they tweet. If you visit bit.ly's website, you can track the performance of links you tweet.

Over time, you should notice patterns for what material your followers receive well. In many cases, it will depend on the audience, which can be quite diverse. Figuring out what makes your Twitter followers click and retweet is a process Boyd calls "micro-psychographics."

In his blog post explaining the phenomenon, Boyd observed that, based on anecdotal evidence, Twitter users respond to tweets differently. Some engage more heavily with questions or declarative sentences, while others prefer emotional prompts evincing anger or happiness. "I have noticed very different responses to different styles of URL-ed tweets," Boyd wrote. "And I think it has to do with the psychological makeup of the recipients of the messages, just as much as the text in the message."

Staff Writer C.G. Lynch covers consumer and social technologies for CIO. You can follow him at @cglynch.

© 2008 CXO Media Inc.

Get IT Expediter by eMail

Tweet This