Twitter can end up being an endless mass of information, links and general ‘life’ updates. So how does one go about using hashtags effectively to filter through the information and manage a conversation with a mass of followers?

If I were to go about creating a hashtag to carry on the topic of this blog post as a discussion on Twitter, the most important step is to head on over to twitter and find out what’s already on there. A search for #hashtag on Twitter brings up people’s thoughts on the #hashtag feature and has many posts within the last hour – not a great one to use if you’re trying to track a conversation – especially if you’re wanting to gather data in a search later.

#hasthtagdiscussion brings up nothing in a search – but with only 140 characters to a tweet, it’s taking up 19 characters of space which could be used for the discussion itself, and has no relation to Percepta, or that we’re holding the discussion.

Again, #perceptahash would be unique but would still take up too much space in a tweet. By shortening the tweet right down to #PerHash, not only would it be unique for a discussion making it easy to track…and taking up only 8 characters makes it the perfect length to be able to compose a useful contribution to the discussion without splitting a message over two tweets.

Below is a checklist to make sure that you get the best use out of those hashtags.

1) Make sure that some, if not all, of your brand name is in the tag
2) Short and sweet is always best
3) When shortening your tag make sure that it makes senses. For example, with Percepta, something like PHDIS (Percepta Hashtag Discussion) wouldn’t make any sense.
4) As above – make sure your users can read the tag which automatically makes it memorable. PerHash is far easier to remember that PHDIS.
5) *ALWAYS* remember to put the # before your #hashtag

What hashtags have you used over on Twitter to effectively hold a discussion? Let me know in your comments below or post a tweet using #perhash and we’ll get back to you.