First and foremost I must apologize for my leave of absence, upon my return from this years WPPI photography convention in Las Vegas I was hit with a horrible flu/upper respiratory infection that took me out of commission for the past 3 weeks. I’ve returned and will jump back into keeping the photographershandbook as up to date with new information as humanly possible as I can. Ok so enough with complaining

There has been an interesting phenomenon on Twitter lately and those are posts prefaced with the # sign or what is called in computer lingo the Hash symbol.

Sites like Facebook make it very easy for users to tag their posts for searching tagged words and finding groups of messages on related topics. Twitter was really never meant to grow into what it has become, therefore this feature was never included in the core functionality of the program. This is where 3rd party developers really shine, the fine folks over at hashtag.org have taken it upon themselves to come up with a solution that solves this problem painlessly, let me explain how it works.

Say you want to start a twitter thread or conversation on a particular subject for instance Canon 5D Mark II (sorry my bias here) and want to easily be able to track what others have to say in response to your post. This is where the Hash Tag comes in handy.

Before you begin however there is one step you need to do before starting in with the hash tag and that is follow the twitter account of the folks over at HashTags.org. You can do so by going to www.twitter.com/hashtags and clicking the Follow button, they will automatically follow you back and you are on your way.

So say you want to solicit feedback or recommendations on the new Canon 5D Mark II. Anywhere within your twitter post all you need to do now is include the following #canon5dmarkII, that hash tag now notifies hashtag.org to start tracking any response that includes #canon5dmarkII.

At any time you can jump over to www.hashtags.org and search for your hash tag term, the results will pull up a grouping of all posts that include your term. You can even use their site to search for other keywords of interest to see what people are talking about. Pretty nifty eh!

Tip: Check with HashTags.org before creating a new grouping to make sure that the tag hasn’t been previously used

Hash Tags are a fast and effective way to follow topics of interest. Other ideas include Events, Tradeshows or even Disasters.

Just another quiver in your bag of social media tricks, I hope you find it helpful.