When I first started using Twitter a few months ago I was kinda disappointed being surrounded by people with hundreds and even thousands of followers. It seemed like a closed circle. If I wanted to get exposure I needed to tweet my message to a lot of people and if I wanted those people to follow me I needed to let them know I exist.

When I found out about Twitter hashtags and the proper way to use them, it was an entirely different story.

What are Twitter hashtags?

Twitter hashtags are strings of text after the # symbol that tag your tweet to a specific topic or just a random word you want. It might not be the easies thing to explain so I like to compare hashtags with TV channels.

Image Twitter to be a huge TV broadcasting network and you tweeting your tweet is actually like asking the network to publish your ads. You also get to pick on which channels your tweet is broadcasted on.

How to use hashtags

Take this Tweet for example:

Check out my new blog post about Monopoly – “Is Monopoly a Game Of The Past?” – http://bit.ly.addy #boardgames

Using the #boardgames tag in the tweet above will make your tweet visible not only to your followers but to everyone that is monitoring broadcasting on that “channel”. Every tag you put in your tweet will also become linkable and by clicking on it, you can watch that channel.

Maybe boardgames is to strict. Not many people are on Twitter to find out about boardgames. So why not add another hash tag so that your tweet appears on both channels.

Check out my new blog post about Monopoly – “Is Monopoly a Thing Of The Past?” – http://bit.ly.addy #boardgames #games

Now that we tagged our Tweet with 2 hashtags we have a much bigger chance for someone to pick it up on their twitter streams. The #games hash tag is going to give us much better results since it’s a much broader term.

Hashtag “Code Of Honour”

Like every feature across the Internet, hashtags can get abused, spammed and therefore ignored. It’s up to the vast Twitter community and its users to have some kind of “Code Of Honour” and to use the tags that are related to their tweet.

Another important thing to remember is to never overuse the tags so that your tweet gets to be secondary to your tags and the hashtags are the first thing someone sees when you tweet.

Remember to leave enough space in your Tweet for someone to re-tweet your message and if you are re-tweeting new tweets, re-tweet them without the hashtags because if that message has already been broadcasted on a channel you don’t want to repeat it again in the same minute or 10, maybe later though.

What I like to do is re-tweet peoples tweets and put my own little hashtags in them just to help others that don’t know how to use the tags or didn’t have time to think of a tag, get more exposure. Of course, I do this only for tweets and accounts that I think are worth my time and so should you.

It all comes down to …

finding the right hashtags. If you like the idea of using hashtags, you are going to want to do some research and find out which hashtags are the most monitored in which subject. Every letter in the hash tag can make a difference like when using #socialnetwork or #socialnetworking or #socialnetworks.

Those are basically the same thing but on Twitter, they are 3 different channels and maybe the first one has 5.000 people monitoring it and the second one has 2.000 people – but the third one has 150.000 people watching the steam.

A single letter in a hashtags can be the difference between getting 10 clicks and 2 re-tweets or getting 50 clicks and 10 re-tweets.

Saving space in your Tweets

A great way you can save space in your tweets so someone can re-tweet them and still use hashtags is using hash symbols in your sentence to transform certain words into hashtags.

Here is an example:

How to start #blogging without having any #copywriting skills – http://bit.ly.addy

Do not hash every word in your tweet, not only that it’s pointless but it looks really spammy as well.

Hash tag research

There are new hash tag directories poping out every few weeks – and they should I guess. It’s one of the “honest” ways to improve your chances of getting twitter followers without joining any paid bogus script programs that automatically follow people.

So far, I have been using the good ol’ Twitter search box. I just think of a hash tag that might be used and write it in the search box along with the # symbol. After a few minutes I can see how often there are new Tweets on that channel and see if it’s worth tagging my tweet with it.

Some hashtags are pretty basic and don’t require any research such as #marketing #blogging #twitter #charity . You can’t go wrong with using the basic form of the word and of course you can always just put all 3 or 4 variations of a word after the hash but remember the “Code Of Honour” we talked about above.

Four sites I suggest to get you started:

http://hashtags.org/ – The best tool I have found so far to get the most out of hashtags

http://search.twitter.com/ – Twitter search box, only bigger

http://tweetchat.com/ – Website that can help you monitor certain hashtags

http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/49309 – Twitter help explains what are hashtags and how to use them

Spread the word

If you know someone who has just started using Twitter or a friend who would like to, share this article and help spread the right way Twitter hashtags should be used. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to voice your opinion in the comments!

Related posts:

1. How I Got 300 Twitter Followers Without Mass Following Others