Using hashtags on Twitter more effectively

oops. forgot the hashtag. leno sucks. #triumph

photo credit: robzand

I am a very, very frequent Twitter user. To be quite frank, there is rarely a day when I don’t open my Twitter client (I use both TweetDeck and HootSuite). I use hashtags (words preluded by a # sign) in my tweets to be able to track conversations around any particular topic (for example, for Mental Health Camp Vancouver 2010 we are using the hashtag #mhcyvr10). The hashtags I use try to add information about the specific topic I am tracking. Amongst the people I follow (and even some people I don’t follow but whose tweets are re-tweeted by people I do follow), I have a number of what I call “hashtag-happy people“. Folks who use LOTS of hashtags within their tweets.

While I appreciate the value of adding metadata, I rarely can retweet those tweets because they are filled with hashtags. My username (@hummingbird604) occupies 16 characters (if you include a space between my username and the actual tweet. That means that I need to keep it brief when I retweet stuff. And I appreciate people’s brevity and the reduced use of hashtags. So most frequently, I simply remove all of their hashtags (or at least, the ones I think won’t be tracked and won’t expand the conversation further) and try to shrink their message as much as I can.

I am not one to preach about specific best practices (I believe we all crowdsource rules of engagement in social media channels, but I would strongly suggest to my hashtag-happy people to cut down on the hashtag use, so that your message doesn’t get diluted. I found a video of Chris Messina talking about hashtags at Northern Voice 2010 (video by Stephen Hui of The Georgia Straight) that I thought would be interesting, for instructional reasons.