Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
Twitter Tuesday: #hashtag #mania
Hashtags are the way to label, sort of categorize, Tweets. They consist of one word (no gaps, apostrophes or other special characters) starting with the hash sign (#). You can search and track hashtags to keep up on Tweets over certain topics. And they are widely overused.
At first the hashtags were just something the Twitter users did. It wasn't any sort of a built-in feature of Twitter and back then only third party sites were offering any decent ways to follow and track them. Actually hashtags originate from IRC where they were used to label channels. Soon after they got a quite popular way to label and find Tweets, Twitter implemented hashtags into their system and now they can be rather easily be searched and tracked within the service.
So why do I think they are so often overused? It's #not very #easy to #read a #sentence where #every other #word is a #hashtag. They work best used moderately in the end of a Tweet. The misuse and overuse has rendered such useful hashtags as #FollowFriday (and it's acronym version #FF) plain useless noise.
Keep in mind the fact that you are trying to communicate with other human beings. Write full sentences if possible. Don't drown your message into hashtags. Use them only when really necessary and appropriate. Use only those tags that actually have some meaning for other Twitter users (not just any random words you want to emphasize).
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