Video Fridays #21 Hashtags ###

Hashtags – what are they? They could be one of your best friends on social media sites and you may not know about them. According to the Twitter Fan Wiki, they are defined as: “a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Hashtags were developed as a means to create “groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku’s channels.”

Basically, they make it easier to find posts on one specific topic. Facebook has adopted the support of hashtags, too. You can search for hashtags but using the search functions on your social media sites.

Here’s a great video on what they are and how to use them.

So when you create a hashtag, make sure no one else is using it and pick wisely.