What The Trend. Find out WHY terms are trending on Twitter. Home. Free Range: Hash. The semiology and phenomenology of hashtaggery intrigues me. From what I understand, it all began very simply: on Twitter, hashtags—those little checkerboard marks that look like this #—were used to mark phrases or names, in order to make it easier to search for them among the zillions and zillions of tweets. For instance, if you wanted to make a comment about Sarah Palin, you could include her name in the tweet, or you could make the comment and follow it with her name marked by hashtag. That is, you could tweet, The tweet with the hashtag was more likely to come up in a search for tweets about Sarah Palin, as well as being punchier and more exclamatory. The practice is now a Twitter standard.
Hashtags have also undergone mission creep, and now do all sorts of interesting things. “Sarah Palin for President??!? This usage totally subverts the original purpose of the hashtag, since the likelihood of anyone searching the term “Iwouldratherhaveamoose” is next to zero. How to Use Twitter Hashtags. If you’re not yet using Twitter hashtags to their fullest potential, you could be missing out on a lot of prospective impressions and engagement. In other words, it could be a missed opportunity to attract a relevant audience on the platform. So even if you know what to Tweet, you might not get optimum visibility for your Tweets without the right hashtags. This guide will explain how and why Twitter hashtags matter for your brand, how to find popular and relevant hashtags and when to use them for marketing. Let’s get started. Why are Twitter hashtags important? Hashtags are a combination of keywords or phrases preceded by the # symbol, excluding any spaces or punctuations.
For example, if you put the # symbol in front of the words “social media,” it becomes a hashtag #socialmedia. Hashtags help group Tweets and conversations around a similar topic so people can easily find and follow what interests them. Hashtags essentially make your content searchable and grouped into relevant topics. How to Find the Best Twitter Hashtags.