What's a Hashtag?

What’s a hashtag? What’s this all about?

Hashtags begin with the "#" symbol
and have no spaces and no punctuation. 

Hashtags are a way to group conversations in social networking. It’s the number symbol “#”’ paired with a word or group of words. Some examples of what a hashtag looks like: #NBA,  #Facebook, #blogging, #SummerBaseball.

Let’s put this in real life (IRL) terms. Let’s say you go to a workshop or conference. The morning session is “open discussions” at each table. You have your coffee and your muffin and you look around to the sign on each table that clearly identifies the topic to be discussed. 

You see a table labeled “Healthy Meals” another table says “I’m So Stressed”, and the table behind you says “Mom Problems.”  You get to choose what conversation you want to join by sitting at that table. 

If these conversations were happening online- you would follow the hashtag (# sign with the Topic - with NO SPACES) #HealthyMeals, #ImSoStressed, #MomProblems. Depending on what social networking site you are on- Hashtags can automatically create a link that will take you to a real time listing of every post that is being made using that exact hashtag. 

Over time hashtags have evolved to be a form of self expression such as #ImSoAwesome and funny run on sentences like #Whydoesmycomputerhatemesomuch. 

Hashtags are slightly addicting once you start to use them. I’ve used hashtags in private messages and email- where there is no functionality for hashtags what so ever, kind of like when you get an email message and try to hit the like button. Come on now- I know you’ve thought about it a time or two!  After writing this I think I’d like to put hashtags in hand written notes. Absolutely NO techie reason- just me being a huge goof! 

I hope you learned a little more about what a hashtag is and how they are used in social  networking. :) 

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