Internet Tech Boston

Here’s another great post that came out of an email conversation. This one was between myself and Mike Lewis, VP Marketing at Awareness, social media guru, and all around great guy.

We were discussing the creation of a hashtag. For those of you who may not be familiar, a hashtag is a simple way to classify information posted on the internet. The reason why this is done, according to Wikipedia, is that “Labeling and tagging are carried out to perform functions such as aiding in classification, marking ownership, noting boundaries, and indicating identity.” They’re most commonly used on Twitter, because there’s no other way to group tweets from different people together. As with anything that involves Twitter, it’s pretty simple. You simply put a pound sign (#) in front of a word, and you have  searchable hashtag. No brainer, right?

Well, at the risk of overcomplicating it, I think there might actually be a real formula for making a good hashtag. Your hashtag should be:

1. Unique. The purpose of a hashtag is so that people can search for, and find additionally content, related to your topic or event. When people search for your hash tag, you don’t want to get mixed up in other people’s content. Good: #dowant – Simply, stuff that people would want. Has taken off as a little meme of it’s own. Bad: #ims. All due respect to Chris Brogan and the team leading the Inbound Marketing Summit, but #ims content is usually about Indy Motor Sports.
2. Short. Hashtags are used all over the internet – from blogs like WordPress, to picture sharing sites like Flickr, to video sharing sites like YouTube, to file sharing sites like Slideshare. But, they are used most heavily on Twitter. We’ve only got 140 characters to play with on Twitter, so we don’t want a huge hashtag. It will prevent people from being able to effectively Retweet your content. Or, they’ll Retweet your content and just drop out your hashtag to save room. Good: #nyt – everyone knows the New York Times.  Bad: #p2/liberal/progressive – It’s a hashtag, not a map to a directory on your computer, folks.
3. Descriptive. It’s gotta make some sense that the hashtag describes the type of content or event or location that you’re writing/tweeting/shooting video of. That way, you can actually work it into the content of your post, rather than just appending it to the end of your tweet like a footnote. Good: #followfriday – On Friday, people share the names of people worth following. Bad: #073109 – huh?

In conclusion, before you settle on a hashtag that may have to live with for awhile, do some simple searches on Google or on Twitter’s Search page, to see what other content is out there, and do some tests in a Twitter client to see much your tweets will have to be shortened, in order to include the hashtag. You’ll be glad you did. You may also want to check out hashtags.org – the definitive directory of hashtags.

What about you? Share your Good and Bad examples of hashtags in the comments!