Site-Hype

If you have been using twitter for a while you have probably seen some update containing a # character? Ever wondered what that is all about and if you are missing something?

A hashtag is an way to add meta tags to your tweet, you use a few of your precious characters to tag your content.

Hashtags can be useful to help follow your updates for example if you are twittering about a specific event like on a conference or twittering about an evolving news story. They can also be used to group postings from several persons on a common subject. To post updates on software/services updates and so on.

At hashtags.org you can follow postings on specific hashtags on all accounts as stories evolve you even get a graph showing activity over time.

Twemes is another nice service that lets you follow a hashtag with matching photos from flickr, you can even get an rss feed with updates on a subject. This can be a great source of ideas for articles.

To create a hashtag simply put the # character before a word describing your update. Before posting hashtags though you need to follow @hashtags on twitter to get your tags indexed (follow people and enter hashtags, it’s the user with more than 60k followers, you will get an immediate follow).

If you are twittering about a common subject start by searching on twittergroups to see if there is already an established hash tag for your updates. If there is you can leverage all the people who are following that hashtag right away without having all the followers yourself.

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