Twitter is an amazing social media tool that offers users the chance to share information with people all around the world in a second.

It is different from Facebook in many ways, but the most obvious one is the length of messages. Twitter messages [known as tweets] have a 140 character limit. A tweet is a 20th century version of a newspaper headline.  Sharing quick messages to the entire universe is a power tool that is available to you for free!

A hashtag is the # symbol and is used to mark keywords or topics in a tweet. People use the hashtag symbol # before a relevant keyword or phrase (no spaces) in their tweet to categorize those tweets and help them show more easily in Twitter Search. Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other tweets marked with that keyword. Hashtags can occur anywhere in the tweet – at the beginning, middle, or end.

If the hashtagged words become very popular, they are called Trending Topics. These topics are seen on the left sidebar of the Twitter page.

Any tweet with the hashtag is grouped together in a separate stream. That way, you can look at all of the tweets in the world with this hashtag. This is how current events are spread so quickly. For example, the earthquake in Japan was tweeted about so much that the hashtag was a trending topic worldwide. People knew what happened minutes after the earthquake because of Twitter. Read more here. 

You may be asking yourself, how can companies use hashtags for their business? Why should I use it? This is a typical question for many people — you are not alone!

If you have events, webinars, etc., think of a clever name for these. All of the tweets with this name will be grouped and shown together in a “Twitter stream.” For example, #dance is a popular hashtag. People all over the world who are talking about dance use this hashtag. Maybe you’d like to use a hashtag for an event. What about Dancing With The Stars? They use #DWTS for each episode. You can read all of the tweets about the show right on Twitter!

To look up a hashtag, use the search bar. You can be signed in to Twitter or you could Google it if you don’t have Twitter!

PS- Follow us @DanceStudioNat!