I never understood the importance of #hashtags on twitter. Seriously! But…

Now I get it!  Thanks to a bunch of really great videos and articles.

Here is a great video by Beacon SEO that explains the hashtag – in just 4 minutes.

Basically a hashtag (#) makes whatever term you put after it searchable by others.(Just remember – no spaces – where ever the space starts your link to the hashtag ends).

So how can a hashtag help me?  Well for instance, what if I send out a tweet about the BCAEA conference. “Learning so much at the BCAEA conference” for example.  Those who follow me on twitter will see my tweet but others in the twitterverse will not.

So, what if I want more people to find my tweet and/or what if I want to know what others are saying about the BC Alternate Educator Association conference? In that case, I absolutely MUST put a hashtag in front of any term in my tweet that I want my followers and anyone else to see.

So, if my tweet said something like: “Learning so much at the #BCAEA ! #bced” – now my tweet can be found by two groups of people – those searching info on BCAEA, and those wanting to know what’s going on in BC education.

So, the moral of the story is – USE HASHTAGS! But use them wisely. You have to keep in mind you are working with 140 characters, so the longer your hashtags the fewer your word count can be.

I also found a couple of really useful sites that have compiled  extensive lists of existing and commonly used hashtags for education. Check them out –  300 educational hashtags and Educational hashtags to follow.

Another cool  site I discovered recently is hashtags.org

This site allows you to search on a particular topic and see who is talking about that topic.   To the right is a sample of a topic I knew would effectively demonstrate how the site works. The first shot  shows the break down by hour of the number of tweets that have gone out on the chosen search term, in this case #doma (Defense of Marriage Act). As you can see below, tweets started picking up right at the time that the Supreme Court announced their ruling that  DOMA was unconstitutional.

The site also lists people who are using that same hashtag in their posts so you can check out what others have to say about your selected topic.

You can sign up and gain more access but really it is not necessary if you are just looking to find others who are tweeting about a topic of interest to you.

Lastly, here are a couple of super helpful twitter guides to get you started and tweeting like a pro in no time.

Adams, D. 150+ Ultimate round-up of helpful twitter and

O’Neil’s The complete guide to twitter.

Stay tuned for my next topic – AGGREGATORS…Yikes!