How To Utilize Twitter Hashtags for Small Business

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How To Utilize Twitter Hashtags for Small Business

Avid Twitter users are fastly learning the tweeting lingo as Twitter become more prevalent in the business community.  You’re likely already noticed tweets that contain a word with the hash symbol (”#”) attached along with it.  This is known as a “hashtag,” and at any given time at least one of them can usually be found among the trending topics on Twitter. So what exactly is a hashtag and how does it relate to business?

Hashtags are essentially an easy way for cataloging and connecting tweets on a given topic, such as internet marketing or social networking.  They facilitate the means by which users search for additional tweets on these targeted topics while at the same time filtering out all the incidental tweets that could just coincidentally contain the same keyword.  Hashtags are also often used by event and conference planners as a method to keep all tweets about an event in a single stream, much like Gmail groups emails together in a feed.  In fact, hashtags were initially popularized during the San Diego wildfire of 2007, when the tag #sandiegofires was used to find tweets about the natural disaster.

Unfortunately, hashtags have become a vehicle for spam as their overall popularity has increased.  As a general rule, you should never use a hashtag on a tweet unrelated to that tag, nor should you stuff your tweets with currently popular hashtags with the sole purpose of appearing in Twitter search results.  Several small businesses have attempted this, often to their own peril.   Proper etiquette dictates that you should only use hashtags if your tweet is actually relevant to the tag’s associated meme or topic.

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