Twitter: What Is a Hashtag & How Do You Use It?
Truckers are online in force. Many of today’s most popular websites and social networks have mobile apps for smartphones, so naturally truck drivers are interested. In addition to their CB radios, their smartphones are their window to the world. One of the biggest social networks on the Web is Twitter. Right now there are thousands of truckers tweeting to their friends and professional peers. CDLLife is on Twitter too!
Do You Know What a Twitter Hashtag Is?
A hashtag is a symbol that means something to Twitter. It’s represented by the pound sign (#). Twitter uses hashtags to categorize something as important. The social network compiles all terms linked to a hashtag, and creates searchable topics out of them. Every Twitter post (or Tweet) that uses a certain hashtag gets moved into a topic feed. So for example, if you want to find out the score on Monday Night Football is, you just type #MondayNightFootball into Twitter’s search window. Twitter will then take you to the feed that has every post by people around the world commenting on Monday Night Football.
How Do You Use a Hashtag While on Twitter?
If you want to contribute to a special feed based on a subject, all you have to do is put the # symbol in front of the subject you’re commenting on. Then other users who are interested in that subject will see it when they look for tweets on that subject. But there are specific rules about using them effectively:
- The hashtag symbol has to be in front of the term.
- The term for the subject you’re commenting on has to be a single word without spaces, even if it’s actually more than one word. So like our example above, Monday Night Football is three words, but the hashtag term has to be created as one word: #MondayNightFootball. The CDLLife hashtag appears as #CDLLife.
- You can’t use punctuation marks within a hashtag term like apostrophes or dashes. Twitter will leave the part behind the punctuation out of the hashtag term when you publish it. So if you type in #CDL-Life, Twitter will read and categorize it as “#CDL” and will just treat “-Life” as regular text.
- You can use as many hashtags for your post as you wish, as long as it fits within the 140 character limit for all tweets.
So what’s all this for?
We want to create a Twitter feed for truckers! We want every trucker out there to know about current events and issues affecting truck drivers and the transportation industry.
We want that hashtag to be #CDLLife
So the next time you’re talking about the trucking industry and have something valuable to share, hastag it with #CDLLife. That way you can contribute to industry talk and more people will read what you say.
Still Confused?
It might seem confusing at first, but once you start experimenting, you’ll be a pro. If you still have questions, just watch this quick 2-minute tutorial on what to do with hashtags. See you soon, Tweeps!
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