HASHTAGS
A hashtag is basically the Twitter equivalent of metadata on a message. If you want your web site or blog to be easily found in the search engines, you would add metadata in the web site headers which will then be picked up by Google. A hashtag is basically the Twitter equivalent. If you want your message to be easily tracked by someone interested in what you are saying, you would add a hashtag next to the keyword. Example: When writing your 140 character message, you would also enter #Newlife. When someone then enters the keyword Newlife into the Twitter search engine, your message would be included in their search results.
Do a search on Twitter first to see if there is already a hashtag being used that you can just pick up on. There’s a website which tracks hashtags called Hashtags : http://www.hashtags.org/. This tracks all the top hashtags and trends of the moment and is extremely useful to use if you want to see what people are talking about. To have your hashtags tracked on the site, you first need to follow their Twitter account: http://twitter.com/hashtages.
USING THE HASHTAG
If you want to draw attention to specific words in a post, or ensure that the post is noticed by a specific group, use the hashtag symbol (#). When people search for specific information on Twitter and want to make sure the word they’re searching for is the main subject of the post and not just randomly added, they place the hashtag symbol before the word.
USING THE HASHTAG AS A MEASUREMENT MECHANISM
To find out whether your username is being hashtagged, follow these steps:
1. Open up your favorite web browser and navigate to : http://search.twitter.com.
2. Enter #yourusername in the Search Field. The Twitter search engine returns a list of tweets with your username preceded by the hashtag.
3. Analyze the list. You see some usernames you recognize and some you don’t. You may also see some bad press. Monitoring hashtags is a wonderful way
of finding out who’s talking about you and what they’re saying. You may also find some people you want to follow.