Hashtags in Twitter posts and how to use them.

Hashtags originated in twitter as means to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages, which can be very helpful when searching trough massive amounts of tweets.  Twitters best practice advice is to limit each post to a maximum of 3 tags.

There are also third party tools that use hashtags. eg. http://trendistic.com/ladygaga ,which show graphical trending charts. Another site hashtags.org  shows popular tags.





An Impressive 1.68% of all tweets had the #ladygaga tag during the release of her new album #bornthisway on the 23rd of May 2011.

Google realtime is a great way to follow hashtags.  Since google realtime also track other services you might want to narrow the tracking to twitter. eg. "#ladygaga site:twitter.com" (remove quotes)  and if you want to remove retweets just add "-RT"

A cool feature on Google realtime is the timeline. Where you can drag the pointer to peak hours of a tag and see the tweets at that point in time.