Social media questions you were too embarrassed to ask - Part 1. What the heck is a #hashtag?

If you have some experience on social media you might be sitting at your desk thinking - "Seriously who doesn't know what a hashtag is?"  And that's why this is the first in my series -

Social media questions you were too embarrassed to ask.

The truth is social media has it's own rules and language and if you're not across them the whole idea of participating in social media is daunting. The language of social media is dominated by terms and language and many, many acronyms and abbreviations that confuse people.

I've met lots of people lately who are new to Facebook, don't "get" Twitter, think Instagram is for young people and have no idea clue what in the known universe Pinterest is. Some of these people want to know but feel silly when they ask and some of them NEED to know but can't get simple answers.

I'm going to do a series of simple blog posts that help answer some of these questions. These are questions that people ask me in real life and I try and explain in simple language. 

So let's get started.

What the heck is a #hashtag?

Here is my simple explanation - if the internet is a giant eyclopedia then the #hashtag is a way to look through the index of knowledge and find something.

If you are on Twitter or Facebook for example and you want to look up pandas you search #pandas (see just pop that hashtag in front) and you will find all the posts by people who have used that hastag ie people who want to share their panda info with you.

See what I did just here and what I found (such cute pandas)

And it works the same way on Twitter.

On Twitter people also use #hastags to follow certain things that interest them. Kind of like putting a bookmark in that encyclopedia so you can find new information. Here's a picture of my own Tweetdeck page (Tweetdeck is a platform to look at  or sort Twitter information). As you can see each column represents a #hastag.

So that's it...a #hashtag is a way to categorise and  look for something on social media.