With last week’s social media glossary for beginners, I get the distinct impression we really hit on something.

The social media sphere is alive and thriving, but there’s so much specialised lingo to get to grips with, and this can make it rather daunting for newbies on the social media scene.

Now, you’re reading this because you’ve at least heard of Twitter. But you may well have heard of hashtags or hashtagging and switched off instantly because it sounds way too technical. But it really is a very simply concept once you know what it is – and, indeed, it makes Twitter a much more useful experience.

So…what is a hashtag?

A hashtag is the # symbol. Messages on Twitter (and other social media platforms) can be tagged by including a hashtag before a specific keyword. The hashtag then makes that word searchable by other Twitter users, and thus helps organise the mass of information into relevant topics and groups.

Hashtag: typical uses

Hashtags ultimately help to organise the constant flow of information on Twitter, and can even enable you to arrange group Twitter chats in real-time. You decide what hashtag belongs to your chat, and then everyone who’s invited to take part in a Twitter conversation appends their Tweet with the agreed hashtag. It helps centralise the conversation under one virtual roof.

Group Twitter chats aside, what other circumstances would you ever need to use a hashtag?

Well, if you’re into this social media malarkey, it’s likely you’re into blogging too. And if you write a blog post, you’ll want to share it with the world. Rather than simply copying/pasting the blog title and link into a Twitter message, if you hashtag certain words, you will reach a far broader audience – some of whom may be potential customers.

So, for example, blur Designs produced a blog post about the launch of the logo for the 2015 Cricket World Cup. And a Tweet was constructed to promote the blog post as follows:

“The 2015 #Cricket #World #Cup #logo is launched. What’s your thoughts? http://ow.ly/4sJ96”

This means that anybody else searching for tweets on any subject relating to the Cricket World Cup would be able to view the blog post. There were many options for hashtagging this Tweet – it could’ve been appended with any number of hashtagged words that weren’t in the blog post title, for example: #logodesign, #branding or #cricketworldcup.

It’s also worth noting that hashtagging only works with printable ASCII characters, which essentially means only the English-language alphabet is compatible with hashtagging.

For example, the German umlaut (ä) or eszett (ß) symbols would cause the hashtag to break at the point where it was used. You’ll see from this image that someone tweeting in Arabic uses the English alphabet for hashtagging purposes.

Hashtagging: a voyage of discovery

It will help you if you investigate hashtags for yourself. When you log-on to Twitter, you’ll notice a list of hashtagged words under ‘trends’ on your home screen. These are a list of the most common hashtagged words currently in use in the location you’ve selected – it could be by country, city or worldwide. Click on some of these trends to get a feel for what terms people are using just now.

That’s the very basics of hashtagging. How you effectively track hashtags, use hashtags and organise hashtags isn’t difficult, but will merit a blog post in itself. So watch this space…and we’ll have the second instalment with you shortly.