CandisLynn

With celebrities like Asthon and Oprah using and evangelizing Twitter, it has recently received an outpouring of media attention and is growing at over 1,000 percent annually in new users. But long before it was popularized by the mainstream media, the Twitter community had found clever ways to use the tool for their advantage. One such clever use is the Twitter Hashtag. While the usefulness of #hashtags remains debatable, with some passionately against their use, I contest that this simple tool is very useful indeed. Here’s why:

• It can help you find a job. A simple search for #jobs or #hiring at search.twitter.com results in hundreds of just-released job posting. In fact, since I started writing this post, 21 new job openings have been posted under the #hiring hashtag, and 154 new openings under #jobs. When paired with more specific hashtags, such as #freelance or #sf (San Francisco), a job seeker can narrow down their search by location or category.
• It can help you learn. So, you want to learn more about WordPress? No problem, just type #wordpress into that Twitter search engine and you’ll find a wealth of information, tutorials, and advice. What about #webdesign, going #green, or figuring out the #socialmedia maze? Yep, there’s a hashtag for that too.
• It can help keep you informed on the latest-breaking news. Whether it’s the #swineflu, the attacks in #mumbai, or the #teaparty movement, Twitter users mobilize very quickly around breaking news stories to send out the very latest, sometimes even before mainstream media breaks the news.
• It can help you find others like you. Maybe you’re a #mother or a #photographer or a conservative (#tcot) or an #obama supporter… chances are, there’s someone on Twitter just like you. They are easily found by using the handy dandy hashtag.
• It can help you spread your message. Did you just write a great blog post, take an amazing picture, or have an important company announcement? When you use the appropriate hashtag in your tweet, it reaches a far wider audience than just your followers alone. It will reach everyone monitoring that conversation, potentially in the hundreds of thousands or more.

I’m sure there are many other useful ways to use Twitter hashtags, but with the examples on this list alone, many people have already found them indispensable. Useless? I think not. What think you?

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Tags: hashtags, Marketing, Oprah Winfrey, Twitter, twitter job search

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 1:55 am and is filed under Social Media, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.