More people are joining Twitter every day — from celebrities to elected officials and people like you and me. While mainstream media regularly reports on the explosive growth and interest in Twitter, many marketers are left wondering how to crack the Twitter code in a meaningful manner. For a little help on how to cut through the hype, we turned to our very own internal social media expert, Al Yukna, VP, director of Interactive Services.

Twitter is a great tool for finding information relevant to your needs in bite-size chunks — if you can get through the noise that has exploded in the Twitter-sphere in the last several months. The use of hashtags (a great, built-in feature for filtering and following content) can greatly help cut through sea of text.

About Hashtags
Hashtags were created to provide users a method for meta-tagging their posts. Meta-tagging works by associating sub-data about a post/topic, etc., on the Web that can be indexed and searched. A very, very loose example would be a Google search. In theory, Google grabs all kinds of content from around the Web and indexes it based on its context. Web sites about collecting stamps are categorized together and sites about model rockets are categorized together.

Site owners have the ability (and it is good strategy) to even further define their site for this indexing function. This is an explanation of which can’t fit into a single post here; however, one method is to assign metadata to the site’s description and to specific content. If a site is in the “model rocket” family of content on a top tier, the site in question may want to deal specifically with, say, “vintage model rockets” and assign meta values accordingly. This meta methodology helps both users searching for content and the site owner, which means everyone is happy and the Internet gains another friend.

How Hashtags Work
With Twitter, metatags exist for the base level function that they do everywhere else: subtext/sub-data. However, finding this content is made very, very easy by the # hashtag function. Here’s how it works:

If you want to find content dealing with, say, the Baltimore Orioles of Major League Baseball, do a Twitter search on “#Orioles” and every post “hash-tagged” with “#Orioles” will come up. Once you’ve performed this search, you can choose to follow this hashtag search as a stream. Depending on your Twitter client (I use TweetDeck at the moment), you can have columns just for tracking your searches. From there, you can follow the hashtag stream to explore new authors to follow or you can watch and/or participate in the stream.

Another great resource for hashtag content is HashTags.org, which tracks popular hashtag trends, tags and people on Twitter.

How to Participate with Hashtags
Once you’ve found some streams you are interested in, how do you participate? It’s simple…really. If you wanted to participate in the Orioles stream, simply put forth an Orioles relevant tweet as such: “Wow, the #Orioles young prospects are really looking good.” All that needs to be done to get your tweet injected into the stream is the hash (#) connected to the “Orioles.” Armed with this power, you must be aware of etiquette, of course. If you abuse this hashtag stream function, you will most likely hear about it by angry users and, quite frankly, who could blame them?

[Aside: creating a hashtag stream for marketing purposes is the topic of another post coming soon...]

What Does this Mean for Marketers?
To get a handle — at least from 30,000 miles out — on your brand, your vertical, etc., hashtags open up a world of possibility. Searching and watching conversations happening in real-time is a great way to interact with current and potential customers if your overall digital strategy and social media strategy calls for it and, most importantly, can handle it. Once you open up this Pandora’s Box of direct conversation, you must be armed with the proper strategy to both monitor and execute or else you may do more harm than good. We can help.