Twitter Hashtag Etiquette

Maybe we don’t give this much thought but Twitter hashtags are popping up all over the place including television shows (particularly on Channel 7 and Channel 9 in Australia). Sometimes, you may want to include a hashtag of your own when you are tweeting or you want a bunch of people to join in a conversation on a given topic or to gauge support for a particular cause.

Either way, it is important bear a few things in mind when selecting or creating a hashtag for a tweet establishing a new conversation or line of thought:

• consistency,
• give careful thought to a hashtag before you unleash it as you may fragment line of thought and conversation if you change hashtags later on (and I am looking at you Celebrity Apprentice Australia who changed hashtags several times in one show).
• relevance,
• the hashtag should have a relationship with the topic being discussed or an inference to the topic that will help people make the connection between the hashtag and the subject matter.
• reasonable length,
• if you are wanting lots of fast tweets (particularly from mobile users) shorter hashtags will make more sense that longer ones plus it preserves precious characters for actual messages.
• uniqueness,
• choosing a hashtag that is brand new or relatively unused will help prevent tweets relevant to your topic from being lost in the “crosstalk” that might occur if you used a hashtag that is still in common usage. It can also be considered bad form to pollute an established hashtag with an overwhelming amount of traffic with tweets deviating from the original topic establishing that hashtag (which is separate from natural and organic changes in conversation over time relative to a hashtag).