WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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Hashtags are really important part of
Twitter, but what exactly is a hashtag anyway?

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Simply put, a hashtag is any word or phrase that's included in a tweet that starts

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with a hashtag symbol (#) which is also
called the pound sign her number symbol.

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When someone includes a  hashtag with
their tweet, they're basically categorizing it.

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So, why do people do this?
Well, if you select a hashtag

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you'll see other tweets that include it as
well.

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This is an easy way to see what's
happening on Twitter or follow with a popular topic.

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Since the posts on Twitter are so short, a
hashtag is often abbreviated.

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In this case, we're looking at hashtag #OTD and based on these other tweets, it looks

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like that stands for "On This Date."

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So, on this date in history, all these
different things happened.

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Hashtags also make it easy to join in
and become a part of this bigger conversation.

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To o use the hashtag, just select
the new Tweet button, and you can see in

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this example that since were were already looking
at the #OTD hashtag, it was included automatically.

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Now we'll just type our post.

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And that's it! We just posted a tweet
with the hashtag and that means anyone

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else looking at tweets related to the
hashtag can find it easily.

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Hashtags are also an easy way to see
what's popular or trending on Twitter.

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In this example we're using the Twitter
app for iPhone, so we're going to select

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the search box to see trending topics.

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The process should be pretty similar if you're using Twitter on different device.

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In a desktop web browser,you'll see
these under Trends.

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Like before, we can select a hashtag to see more tweets about it.

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One other thing we'd like to mention are the search filters.

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If you're using the Twitter app, you'll
select the search filters icon near the top.

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And if you're using Twitter on the desktop, you should be able to click anywhere in the

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search bar to access the same options.

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From here you can narrow down your
results to see only photos about this

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hashtag, or only videos,

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accounts that might be relevant
to this hashtag or even just tweets from

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people you follow that include it.

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Alright! That's all we've got! Those are  the basics of hashtags on Twitter.