Best Hashtag Usage

Hashtags are an easy way for Twitter users to find tweets on a certain subject on Twitter . Hashtags are shown with the ‘#’ symbol before a word or phrase. Further, multiple hashtags can be shown in a message to identify the subject matter of the message to increase the scope of possible viewers. For content creators, hashtags are a way for readers on Twitter and search engines to find your tweets.

Hashtags are useful not only in identifying the subject of the tweet to immediate readers, but since it can be searched on at a later time, to future readers. Choosing the right sets of hashtags will help your message stand out and get more exposure to the message.

A Rose By Any Other Name – How Popular is a Hashtag?

It is common to see #hashtags appearing in the Trending Topics sidebar when a topic becomes popular, but unless you are posting something specific about that trend, you should not use that hashtag value in your tweets. The sheer volume of tweets with a trending hashtag will make it difficult for your tweet to be found.

A good first step is to determine how popular a given term is in the Twitterverse. A service such as Indextank allows users to see the popularity of a given term and how popular it is over time.

Finding #Fitness Article Links

As an example, a search is done on the term #fitness. Searching for #fitness at another site Hashonomy.com uncovers tweets with articles that contain the hashtag #fitness and what some of the related hashtags found:

#windsurfing
#chance
#glamakids
#sixpackabs
#brucelee
#na
#strengthtraining
#rw3
#workout_routines
#dirtbikes
#cleaneating
#hiit
#san_diego_ca
#smashfit
#stand
#mens
#sunshine
#windsor
#squash
#healthyliving
#woohoo
#primal
#bodybuilding
#victoria
#eating
#york
#surrey
#fruit
#dining
#model

Including the terms above can further increase the exposure of a message.

Using Multiple Hashtags

Grouping multiple hashtags together creates a hashtag combination which arithmetically increases the potential of the message showing up with a hashtag search. Searching for any one of the terms will find all messages with that term. The audience for each hashtag has both an immediate and a future potential message exposure. Not only do your followers get this message, but also anyone immediately searching on the term as well as future users searching for the term can also find the message. Using more popular combinations of terms yields greater message exposure. The term #Fitness has a total of 201 messages with URL links containing the following popular hashtag combinations:

Tweets_____Hashtag Combination
12K_______#diet #fitness #fit
2K________#walking #bullies #fitness
845_______#tip #health #fitness
230_______#exercise #workout #health
202_______#fitness #nutrition #beer
117_______#obesity #food #diet
101_______#diet #exercise #weightloss
101_______#exercise #workout #health
15________#dollar4peace #food #fitness
6_________#weightloss #talent #happiness

As an example if one tweets a message to 1000 followers with the first hashtag combination, that message gets out to the 1000 followers plus all the readers of the hashtag value. Conservatively, this unseen audience can be 10X larger than the number of followers. The results above indicate that using the combination of #diet #fitness #fit in a message can help more users find a fitness message. In general, my experience is to a limit a message to a maximum of 3 hashtags, #otherwise #it #is #annoying #to #readers #and #adds #no #value #to #the #content.

Searching on Hashtags

Looking on a search engine with the words - Popular hashtags Your_Term - is another way of finding web pages listing hashtag terms that could be of interest.
One site shows information on hashtags for fitness chat sessions:

#FitBlog Chat
#SFCFit Chat
#hcsm Chat
#BFrunning Chat
#runchat Chat
#mamavation
#tworkout Chat

Additional articles can appear like How to Use Twitter for Fitness that can provide additional insights for hashtag use.

Going International

An important point to consider is that Twitter is an international communications channel so the English language is not the only language used on the service. Although this blog is new it has readers in:

Canada
United Kingdom
Japan
Ireland
Netherlands
Brazil
Switzerland
Indonesia
Mexico

Try creating some tweets in a language other than English with appropriate hashtag values to grow internationally!