Ten Things You Need to Know About Hashtags

I hate hashtags. They’re designed to make Twitter seach easier, but
I’m not sure they are necessary, they are often duplicative, and they
leave fewer characters for tweets. And yet, the’ve caught on. It might
be time for a primer on hashtags.

 1)A hashtag is a search tool. Hashtags were created to help people
search more easily, although I tend to doubt it.

 2)If you are holding an event and you want people to tweet about it or
during it, choose the shortest possible hash tag. You want people to
be able to live-tweet it, right? You don’t want them taking up ten
characters with a hash tag.

 3)Hash tags are a utility. They don’t have to have cach-ay (with an
accent agu over the final “e”). Don’t try to make them clever; make
them a shortcut for what your tweeters might be searching for.

 4)If you have a conference with a date, use a hashtage mentioning the
year (#azec09), just in case you hold it again next year:-)

 5)If you can, make your hashtag and the social site URL for your
participants as similar as possible.

 6)Let people know in advance what the hashtag is — at the beginning
of the conference, on the website, in a Twitter feed. Many people
still won’t use it.

 7) No, there is no central hashtag registry, although one day someone
will try to take advantage of newbies by creating one and monetizing
it.

 8) Ask yourself often what good a hashtag like “Justsayin” does. Who
searches for that?

 9) On the other hand, your hashtag can be part of your brand
(@queenofspain’s #suckit), But you have to stick with it.

 10) Your hashtag can be part of a campaign ( @drew’s
“#Iblamedrewscancer,). This is a good use of a hashtag even though it’s long.

 There must be more. Geeks, help me out here:-)

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