#hashtag

Just when I thought I understood social media, Twitter throws me a curve ball! I was reading some tweets by @CraigyFerg and one of my friends, @heppnerd and I noticed that they (and others) were heavily using the "#" symbol before certain words and I didn't know why. At first I thought it might just be the way people type on Twitter...sort of a new version of texting, then I thought I might just be getting old. :( Either way it seemed like Gibberish to me!

So in order to understand why people we writing like this I did what most people would do - I Google searched!

Apparently in Twitter the "#" sign is called a hashtag and it isn't a screwed up version of texting; it's actually rather ingenious! For those of you who do not tweet you may not know that you cannot categorize your tweets like a blog can. If you look at the bottom of my post today you will see two "tags" or "labels" called Twitter & Social Media. These tags are used to group my posts so that if someone visits my blog they can click on "Twitter" and pull up all my blog posts that relate to Twitter in some way. Twitter does not have this function.

Twitter users get around this issue by adding the "#" sign before certain words. So for example, during the 2008 elections one could have used "#2008elections" in order to group all of their comments/posts that related to that subject to make it easier for people to follow this topic.

Now the next time you are on Twitter you and I will know what all the "#" signs mean and we can use them too!

#NowYouKnowTheRestOfTheStory
Follow me on Twitter - @jaywelters