Effective #Twitter #Marketing with #Hashtags
No, this isn’t one of those annoying Get more followers campaigns to artificially inflate your following on Twitter with irrelevant followers. This is how to effectively increase your voice on Twitter so that your tweets are found by relevant audiences who aren’t following you.
The answer is called a hashtag. There are tons of people and programs searching Twitter right now for real-time news and events that search for hashtags.
A hashtag is the pound sign # followed by a tag that explains what the topic is that you’re writing about. If I’m writing about the economy, I might write #economy within my tweet. If I’m writing about Indianapolis, it might be #indy. If you’re utilizing Twitter for business, effective use of hashtags is a must.
Here’s an example. When I recently released the WordPress Author Sidebar Widget on my blog yesterday, I could have simply tweeted that it was released and my 7,800 followers would have read about it.
Instead, I added hashtags #wordpress and #plugin to the message:
The Tweet was immediately picked up and retweeted by hashwp with 960 followers, hashwordpress with 1,034 followers and wpscoop with 121 followers on Twitter. That’s over 2,000 more people that I was able to communicate the message to. That led to approximately 40 additional visits to my blog.
Oh, and this is also a good way to pick up relevant followers! 
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Happy to see we can help send some traffic and spread the link love a little Douglas, submitting your actual article to the WPscoop site will help you even more though
i am reading your e-book, 25 steps blogging for SEO and have always wondered what a hash tag was. i have been on twitter for over 6 months and still haven't figured those things out. now i know! and now i know their name! thank you!
[...] Twitter, you can do this by researching hashtags and finding the people behind those industry tweets. Advanced tools such as Radian6 can also help [...]