Monday, November 29, 2010

Secrets of Twitter Hashtags (For Those Still Unsure)

Still feeling confused by Twitter Hashtags- those words that start with a # symbol that you keep seeing on Twitter?

Wondering how to start or use a hashtag for your own purposes? Want to find out what a particular hashtag means?

Trying to figure out how to use hashtags for a particular purpose – to share information, to unite around an event perhaps?

Twitter hashtags are a great tool for finding, following and participating in topical discussions relevant to you.  Here I’ve put together a collection of articles with information and advice on using Twitter Hashtags.

There are three sections – How-To Use Hashtags, Tools to help you use them, and examples of ways to use Hashtags.

Amazon.com Widgets

Hashtag Tutorials & How-To’s

Hashtag Tools and Resources

  • Tools for Monitoring Conversations in Twitter
    From Bub.blicio.us: Discussion of how to use Hashtags.org and Twemes to find relevant topics and join productive conversations on Twitter. Especially important if you are a representative for a company and/or brand seeking solutions for effectively listening to the community in order to help them answer questions or provide them with useful information.
  • #hashtags.org
    All Twitter updates that include a valid hashtag are indexed at Hashtags.org.  Here you can search and see trends for that hashtag as well as a list of recent tweets with that hashtag.  This means that you don’t have to be a Twitter user to follow the conversation — it’s visible to anyone.  Hint: you can also see all the tweets for a hashtag by adding the hashtag name at the end of the site’s URL: http://hashtags.org/tag/ for example: http://hashtags.org/tag/followfriday for the #followfriday hashtag.
  • What the Hashtag?!
    A wiki-based user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter. They have a bot that actively monitors Twitter for trending hashtags and creates new pages as they grow in popularity. Then it’s up to the users to fill in the details. They offer a bot service that allows you to ask them what a hashtag stands for. Then they send you back a short description plus a link back to the page they’re hosting for the specific hashtag. There are also some Firefox and Greasemonkey tools for use.
  • Tagalus
    Ever find yourself looking at Twitter and wondering what all this talk about #motrinmoms means? Searching Flickr and not understanding why someone would tag their photo #ip4?  A real-time dictionary for hashtags, Tagalus lets users define tags so that others can understand what they’re talking about. Other users can vote on definitions and decide which best describes the given tag. You don’t need to log in to browse the tags and definitions, but if you would like to contribute a tag, vote on a definition’s authority, comment, etc. you have to use an OpenID to log in. You can also use Tagulus on Twitter (@tagulus) to get and set definitions by sending one of two commands that @tagalus understands. You can also get a bookmarklet for your browser.  For a nice review of Tagulus see this post from ReadWriteWeb:  What Does that Hashtag Mean? New Service Tells You.
  • TweetChat
    TweetChat is a tool that helps you monitor and chat about one topic. Each tweet you make automatically gets a hashtag added for the room you are in – no need to worry about hashtag typos..The room auto-updates with new posts using the hashtag you are following – no need to reload…Good tool for anyone wanting to create or contribute viaTwitter around a specific tagged topic.
  • HashTweeps
    Find Twitter users by hash terms
  • Twitag
    Twitag is a #tag finder for twitter that helps facilitate and organize the most recent content tagged by users.
  • What the Trend
    What the Trend helps you find out what’s trending on Twitter and why

Different Ways to Use Hashtags

February 4th, 2010

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