Twitter, as we all know, is an online social networking service that enables its’ users to send and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”. Users can send these tweets to users that they follow and that the tweet can be retweeted, favourited or even replied to.
The hashtag, or pound sign, is a symbol that’s widely used within Twitter and other social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, Pintrest, YouTube, Google+ and Vine. Hashtags has become a very common practice today where people started using hashtags outside of their intended purpose, like in text messages, chats, songs, and advertisements. This unique symbol is originally used within a message, or tweet, to identify a keyword or topic of interest in order to allow users to search for that topic or keyword.
When a user adds a hashtag to their post, it is immediately indexed by the social network (i.e Twitter) in real time; and it will become searchable by other users of the same social network. Once someone clicks on that specific hashtag, they’ll be brought to a new page that stores all the posts that contains the same hashtagged keyword. If a keyword or two gets a lot of clicks from users, it becomes a trending topic.
There can be hashtags that can be very popular and can make a huge impact, like the recent #WeWantBoth tag for Starbucks so that its’ customers across Canada can get both the gingerbread latte and eggnog latte instead of the former in the east coast and the latter in the west coast. Other hashtags, however, are just there for users to search so that they can find the information that they’re looking for but never underestimate the power of the hashtag.