I've been reading some of the stories about Twitter, the new social media tool that's being hailed as the next big thing and in a lot of those stories I see hashtags everywhere. Hashtags, or short for "hashtags", are a way to have tags in your tweets.
Think of it like this: When you send out a tweet you can put a hashtag at the end of the message, in the subject line, or in the body of the tweet. The hashtag allows other people to know what you're talking about.
So what's the catch with using a hashtag in a tweet? Well, if you are tagged by another user, but they didn't use a hashtag to tag you, then you will get no benefit. So, if someone tweets, "@Mary, @cindy, @Martin are celebrating the wedding anniversary", and that person hasn't used a hashtag, then the #Wedding anniversary is not relevant to the person they were talking to, but to the rest of us who don't get that detail because we don't know the two people.
The other big problem with using hashtags is when you are talking about a social cause. For example, if someone is protesting a certain topic, and they use a hashtag to make their posts known, then their followers can see that the hashtag was used and learn about the protest or the event. If someone tweets something like, "Stabbing at Burning Man festival, 13 people are hurt", and then that person has a hashtag, that person's followers can see that the hashtag was used and they can learn more about the event. They are also able to find out who the person is that was hurt.
So the goal of a hashtag is to draw attention to a cause, product, service, or business. It isn't to act as a search engine. So the real problem with using a hashtag to draw traffic to your website, blog, or even your sales page is, it doesn't work very well if you don't understand how hashtags work.
My friend, Jason wrote an interesting article on Twitter, tagging, and using hashtags everywhere. In that article he argues that hashtags aren't that important and that they do more harm than good. In that article he also points out that hashtags are "unverifiable". He says that people should be able to say anything and then everyone else can post about that, as long as they don't abuse the hashtag system.
I think he misses the point entirely because I'm sure if he really looked at his tweets he would find that he had a lot of #hashtags on them. But then again, he has millions of followers and because they trust him and because he's an internet marketer, he feels he doesn't need hashtags. Well, what would you do if you had millions of followers that trusted you?
In my mind I guess that would be the equivalent of a guy with a banner that said, "The word man; give me men", but every time you clicked on it, it said, "The word farmer; give me farmers", right? The end result of the same campaign was the same. This is why hashtags should be used as part of a bigger marketing strategy because they are able to help market, not hurt.