What the hash? Twitter hashtags for chats and parties

Sep 14, 2010 by Stephanie

So you’ve been using Twitter for a while and notice that a whole bunch of people seem to be using the number sign (#) with a word or some letters behind it. What does it mean and why are they doing that? They’re Hashtags! Hashtags are an unofficial way to pull together Twitter posts either in real-time or asynchronously across time.

How To Use a Hashtag

There are a number of ways to use a hashtag on Twitter:

To indicate that you’re taking part in a Twitter meme: for example, Follow Fridays, indicated by #FF; or #fail, to indicate that something (a brand, product, service, or experience) didn’t meet up to the user’s expectations
To categorize your tweet within a larger conversation that’s happening, as with current events (#oilspill was quite popular for most of this summer)
To market a brand, product or service – often by indicating the brand name with the hashtag (see the #HormelSpam example below)
To participate in a Twitter chat or party – a synchronous gathering of people who are all tweeting about the same topic at (roughly) the same time

We’re going to explore the mechanics of how to use hashtags for chats and parties here, and in my next post I’ll delve into some of the specifics on joining and hosting Twitter chats and parties.

Hashtags for Chats and Parties

Both Twitter parties and chats utilize hashtags to help all of the people in the chat/party to talk within the group, rather than the Twitter universe as a whole. A hashtag is easily searched on Twitter, and therefore chat/party participants can find each other by searching for the designated hashtag among the greater Twitter stream.

Here are two hashtags in use within one tweet: #GNO and #HormelSPAM. #GNO is a popular regular Twitter party (more on that in my next post), and this tweet indicates that Hormel Spam is the topic (and/or sponsor) of the party.

Searching/Viewing Hashtags

Once you know the hashtag you are trying to follow, you need a way to search Twitter to make isolate the hashtag you want from all of the other tweets happening at that moment. One way to do this is to use Twitter’s search function.

Here is a search for #BlogHer10 using Twitter’s search:

Another way to isolate hashtags is to use a third-party Twitter platform that allows you to set up a search. Platforms that will do that include TweetDeck, HootSuite and CoTweet. There is also a platform called TweetGrid that was more-or-less built for Twitter chats, which I recommend and often use with clients. TweetGrid is ugly, but it gets the job done. Here’s a Tweetgrid example using #GNO as a hashtag in the first column, searching for the party participants in the 2nd and 3rd columns and including myself (@socialologist) in the last column. This is so that I can see tweets directed at me during the party and I can reply right from TweetGrid instead of having to look at my usual Twitter reader during the party. (Click on the image to embiggen.)

As you can see, TweetGrid allows you to keep track of multiple searches, and also lets you tweet directly from that interface – it even adds the hashtags in to your tweet automatically.

So now that you know how to participate – next post we’ll talk about the where to participate – Twitter Chats and Parties. If you have questions about anything hashtag related, please ask in the comments!