Hashtags are really important part of Twitter, but what exactly is a hashtag anyway?
Simply put, a hashtag is any word or phrase that's included in a tweet that starts
with a hashtag symbol (#) which is also called the pound sign her number symbol.
When someone includes a hashtag with their tweet, they're basically categorizing it.
So, why do people do this? Well, if you select a hashtag
you'll see other tweets that include it as well.
This is an easy way to see what's happening on Twitter or follow with a popular topic.
Since the posts on Twitter are so short, a hashtag is often abbreviated.
In this case, we're looking at hashtag #OTD and based on these other tweets, it looks
like that stands for "On This Date."
So, on this date in history, all these different things happened.
Hashtags also make it easy to join in and become a part of this bigger conversation.
To o use the hashtag, just select the new Tweet button, and you can see in
this example that since were were already looking at the #OTD hashtag, it was included automatically.
Now we'll just type our post.
And that's it! We just posted a tweet with the hashtag and that means anyone
else looking at tweets related to the hashtag can find it easily.
Hashtags are also an easy way to see what's popular or trending on Twitter.
In this example we're using the Twitter app for iPhone, so we're going to select
the search box to see trending topics.
The process should be pretty similar if you're using Twitter on different device.
In a desktop web browser,you'll see these under Trends.
Like before, we can select a hashtag to see more tweets about it.
One other thing we'd like to mention are the search filters.
If you're using the Twitter app, you'll select the search filters icon near the top.
And if you're using Twitter on the desktop, you should be able to click anywhere in the
search bar to access the same options.
From here you can narrow down your results to see only photos about this
hashtag, or only videos,
accounts that might be relevant to this hashtag or even just tweets from
people you follow that include it.
Alright! That's all we've got! Those are the basics of hashtags on Twitter.