#Hashtags

#Hashtags are Nothing to #joke about

On September 24, 2013, #JustinTimberlake appeared on Late Night with #JimmyFallon with a skit about #Hashtags. The video has gone viral with more 17 million views on YouTube and countless more on reposts. While it was a spoof on what Twitter conversations may sound like in verbal conversation, it is brings up a very important point. Hashtags are an important part of online conversation and if you want to be seen online, you must learn to love them.

I dedicated this week to discussions about sharing your ideas online. Posting is only a part of the sharing process. The more critical part is getting your content seen and read. Hash tags play a very important role in this process. Hashtags used to be a Twitter thing. In 2013, Facebook came on board giving much more credibility to them. Finally, Google+, who previously supported hash tags, reaffirmed their commitment by elevating their prominence in posts. These giant steps this year have made hashtags a critical component of the online conversation.

According to a Forbes.com article this week, a study was recently released concluding that, “tweets that contain one or more hashtags were 55% more likely to be retweeted than those that did not include them.” The results were based on a dataset analyzing 1.2 million tweets.

So hashtags are nothing to joke about. They are your way of moving from someone who posts an idea to someone who has created that great idea that everyone knows about.