“Use Twitter to promote your website!” That’s the wise advice that so many career-bloggers like to share, but they never really tell you how.

“Use hashtags!”

“People don’t maximize Twitter’s benefit because they don’t know how to use hashtags.”

“Hashtags, hashtags, hashtags!”

“Success is met by mastering the art of the hashtag.” How zen.

Okay, great advice, but just what does this all mean? What the heck is a hashtag and what does it do?

Twitter Hashtags are like Keywords for SEO

If you are an online writer, chances are that you understand SEO and how to effectively use it to drive traffic to your website. In a nutshell, it’s all about including keywords and phrases in your article – those that Internet surfers use in search engines, such as Google, to find worthy articles, such as yours.



Hashtags are basically the keywords and phrases of Twitter. They are preceded by a, well, hashtag. For example, the hashtag for athletes is #athletes.

Now that you know what hashtags are, it’s useful to know how to use them.

How to Use Twitter Hashtags

Let’s use my article, “Petechiae Causes.” To promote this article, I first searched Twitter for relevant keywords. My motivation for writing that article was the appearance of petechiae on my shoulder after working out, so the article, while thorough, goes a step further than other articles and explains its impact on exercisers. I searched the following “hashtags” to see what kind of things others were posting, and whether it was worth using my limited Twitter space to include these hashtags: #WeightTraining, #Workout, #Fitness, #Health, #Petechiae, and #Exercise.

In my searches, I included the hashtag (#) with each keyword, just as above, because it brings up different search results. For example, #WeightTraining will bring up results with #WeightTraining, whereas WeightTraining will bring up any tweet containing “WeightTraining,” whether or not it is a hashtag. All of the hashtag results looked great, except no one else posted anything under #Petechiae, but I figured, why not start that hashtag? After all, I might write about it in the future, and if someone else does, my tweet will show up!

Since my true target for the article are weight trainers who experienced this condition, I composed my tweet with a search term that they would use and I included all relevant hashtags:

Have you seen red dotted lines on your skin after your #WeightTraining #Workout ? http://goo.gl/WbdSJ #Fitness #Exercise #Petechiae #Health

Each hashtag turns into a link to all recent tweets using that hashtag. It’s that simple. People search for hashtags to find useful information.

Since there is a character limit on Twitter, it is useful to hashtag keywords within your article title when posting it to Twitter. My article, “Improve Sleep Hygiene to Fight Sleeping,” became this:

Improve #Sleep Hygiene to Fight #Sleeping Trouble http://goo.gl/8g1dV – #Health

If you have a key phrase, such as, “Sleep Hygiene,” remove the space between the two words: #SleepHygiene. I did not use this particular hashtag because the search yielded zero results. I figured #Sleep and #Sleeping were more useful. I added #Health at the end because it is a health article.

Those are the great and powerful secrets of the hashtag. Although not really explained well by many, it takes a little playing around to understand. After you’ve got it, Twitter can be a lot more fun, and much more beneficial for your success.

Tweet