Once you have begun to use Twitter, it won’t take long before you start to see what is known as a hash tag (#) being used by people in their tweets. What you will begin to see is a word or phrase with a # (hash) tag before it. Read on to find out how to use # on Twitter…
A hash (#) tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you search on #IRELAND (or #Ireland or #ireland, as it’s not case-sensitive), you’ll get a list of tweets related to Ireland. This is an obvious hash tag, and most usually are. However, some are less obvious. For example, recently Toyota used the hashtag #100cars to promote them giving 100 cars over 100 days to non-profit organistations based on a public vote, see below:
So if you wanted to know how the voting was going or some other news relating to the competition, you can search for “#100cars” at search.twitter.com and see all the related posts, assuming users who tweeted about it used the tag.
It’s important to note that hash tags can be made up by users and in a way it is an “unofficial” categorization method developed by the Twitter community. So for example, if your post is about Dublin or your hotel in Dublin for example, you can include the hash tag “#dublin or #dublinhotel”. The more exact the word used after the # tag the less people will search for it but whomever does, for them it will be a lot more relevant. In a way you have to figure out how relevant you want your message to be to people. You can go for a wide untargeted audience with a hashtag like #Dublin or niche it down with one such as #dublinhotel and get a smaller but much more relevant audience.
To Summarise…!
Basically people use the hashtag symbol # before relevant keywords in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets to show more easily in Twitter Search. Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets in that category. Hashtags can occur anywhere in the Tweet. Hashtagged words that become very popular are often Trending Topics.
Don’t #spam #with #hashtags. Don’t over-tag a single Tweet. Use hashtags only on Tweets relevant to the topic.
Any that’s it, happy ermm hashing! Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.com/Visrez #thanks 
