What is a Hashtag (#) or Pound Sign on Twitter?

A "hashtag" , or a pound sign, is a Twitter term for the symbol that looks like this: #

When used in Twitter, the hashtag signals that the person Twittering is referring to a subject, or common theme or topic that other people are talking about in Twitter.

Here's a good article that defines the hashtag and gives a bit of history. Side note: funny that 'history' now defines something that is not even a year old, as of this post.

TECHNICAL USES OF THE HASHTAG #
A technical side effect of using this term, is that depending on how you are accessing Twitter, either from TweetDeck, Tweetie, or the regular old fashioned way at www.Twitter.com, Twitter will activate the phrase that directly follows the #. Here is an example of the # (hashtag) in use:

@ktjames I love to follow @collectivee, @sabinaredbranch, @bethschoenfeldt, @popjudaica @TheEllenShow, #followfriday

This is an example from a tweet from me, @ktjames, to my followers. I am telling them that I like to follow these Twitterers (remember, the Twitter name is offset by the @ symbol, and Twitter automatically makes it a link for you). I end it with #followfriday. This hashtag phrase is a commonly used phrase that people us on Fridays to tell their followers who else they like to follow. It helps spread the Twitter love by helping your Twitter friends gain followers.

BRANDING AND YOUR HASHTAGS #
Anyone can make up their own reason for a #, but it's up to the Twitter community to pick it up and use the hashtag. If you are going to make up your own hashtag, keep in mind that what makes sense to you, might not make sense to your followers, or potential new followers. #followfriday is a nice example because it states what it is: It is an activity that happens on a Friday when people shout out who they like to follow.

If I were to make up a hashtag for an event series at Collective-E for our Industry Insights, I could name it: "#CEII", which could stand for "Collective-E Industry Insights". But that probably would not make much sense to you. A more effective hash tag could be: "#industryinsights". Yes it takes more space, but it gets to the point.

If I were to make up a hashtag for the brand of this blog, I could call it "#kjpblog", which would stand for Katie James Pixelated Blog. You tell me if that would catch on or not. ;) I use KJP to refer to my brand, but I would need to become pretty solid in my brand for others to recognize the acronym. I would also need to tweet a lot about my blog. Maybe I'll try it and report back. ;)

Have you created any hashtags? And have they taken off?

How to Create an Auto DM (direct message) for Twitter Followers

Note: This post was originally published on the Collective-E blog.

Here is how to create an auto DM (automated direct message) from your Twitter account to a new follower. For those who don't know, an Auto DM (or Automated Direct Message) is an instant message you get, that usually arrives in your email inbox, from the person who you just clicked to follow you in Twitter. You can access DMs in your side column of Twitter, or through a helpful application like TweetDeck. See below for the link of where you can access your personal DMs in Twitter. In theory, no one else can see them but you.

Once you have set this up, please share with us what you have chosen for your DM. What creative message did you think of? Auto DMs have been debated lately as a bad strategy, as they suggest laziness an wreek of infomertial-type people. So just be careful when you are creating them.

Go to TweetLater.com and register for an account.

Once you submit your registration, you may be taken to their newsletter page. Sign up or ignore this.

You'll need to log in again. Find the login button (as of this post, it's in the top right corner), and log on (even tho it seems like you would now be logged in, since you just created an account).

Now you must tell TweetLater about your Twitter account.

Click the blue +Twitter button in the top navigation.

Enter your Twitter username and password. I can't vouch for the level of security involved here. Making this decision is up to you.

Scroll down a bit and click the "Auto Welcome" button.

Also on this page, you can select if you'd like to auto follow those who follow you, or auto unfollow those who unfollow you. However, Twitter just decided to do away with the auto-follow feature because it seems disingenuous (which is my philosophy as well...and thanks @pegsamuel of @socialdiva for this Twitter Tip-off). TweetLater can provide this because they have worked with Twitter's API, which just means that Twitter allows them to use some of their technology to make fancy tools like this one.

The next question they ask you before you click "Save" is whether or not you want your @replies sent to you via email. @replies are the times that someone in Twitter is either talking to you or about you. This could be handy if you can't check your replies as often as you'd like. You can always see your replies in TweetDeck (for your computer), on Twitter itself (online), in Tweetie or Twitterific (on your phone) or other ways. You can also do a Twitter search for your name at search.twitter.com, or now from the new search box on the right side of your home page at Twitter.

NOTE: When I tested this, by way of following myself from another Twitter account, the DM did not come right away, or even for a few days. The Support people at TweetLater, who were very nice, told me that there was a delay/problem with the Twitter API that day, so things were a bit out of whack. It did send a day or two later.

If you've had success with the auto DM, do let us know in the Comments below. If you've noticed that you've actually lost followers (people who unfollow you in protest of your robotic DM), also let us know.

PS: You can also use TweetLater.com to auto opt out of DMs that are sent to you (um...would that be bad karma if you have created one and set up your account to send them...? Think about it.).

What an Alt Tag/Attribute and Link Love Can Do for a Temporary Home Page

So by the way, I'm starting a new company with two power houses in the women's entrepreneurial world (official announcement to come). And in doing so, we are building a mega website with lots of fun function for promoting your business. The purpose of today's post, however, is to demonstrate how a brand new URL with very little content and a lot of secrecy is already ranking Page 1 #2 of Google for the company name in as little as 6 days (could be less, this is just when I checked) without submitting to any directories or sending any requests to link to other websites.

Step 1: Buy the domain. Duh.

Step 2: While you build the core of your website, put up a temporary home page. But don't put up a giant image with your company logo and text saved in Photoshop or something. Go the extra mile and make the individual images that are not text, like your logo, and create content to go onto your page. Pay the programmer extra to do this for you. It's worth it. Google and other search engines will be able to start crawling what text, links and images you do have on there.

Step 3. If you have images, you have the opportunity to fill in the "alt attribute" sometimes known as the "alt tag". This tells blind people what image is appearing if they can't see it (it's spoken to them). Or if a person has images turned off on their Internet in order to load pages faster (aka not sucking down images), they can read what image would have been there. These alt attributes are considered by Google, so if you can, and if it makes sense to what the image actually is, include your keywords in these alt attributes.

Here is a screenshot of how my search term "collective e" is finding the keywords on the web page:


This picture shows how the search results are displaying the copy on the page. In bold, in the search results, Collective E is displayed. But as you see here in the picture, circled red, Collective-E is an image of a swirly font. Therefore, it is not actual text. To put "alternative" text there, for computers to read, we inserted "Collective E". It is that alt="Collective E" that is seamlessly being displayed in the search results.

Step 4: Find reasons to put links on your temporary home page. Gives search engines more to travel through on your site, and one more reason why you might look like a worthwhile and helpful website.

Step 5: If you have a blog, link to your new website from your blog on your side panel, like I did.

Step 6: Start Tweeting about your new website at Twitter.com to your friends, and include the URL in the tweet. Try to use the actual URL instead of a TinyURL, just for ultimate impact's sake. Google is returning tiny Tweets in its search results, so make sure you're lookin' good!

Step 7: Find a reason to blog about your new company, and include the company name, Collective-E, in the blog post. And link to it (as shown).

You are well on your way to building a solid foundation for a well optimized site. When you do launch, your content will be searched all the quicker by the mack daddy search engines. Just think - you haven't even built the Facebook Page for it yet (a Facebook Page is a public access page that search engines index), or added it as a Company or a Group in LinkedIn!

Summize Replaces Need to Hit Twitter's Replies Tab

Just in case you haven't tried it yet, Summize.com just saved you tons of time and frustration for when Twitter Replies stresses out. Summize somehow tracks all of the tweets from Twitter, and is a big search bank for words that you need to know have been mentioned.

If you aren't in the habit of clicking that Replies tab in your Twitter profile, you should start. It's a great way to know if someone tweeted back to you, or randomly to you. You can't be on Twitter all day long, so if you tweeted in the morning, and then are checking in at night, you can see if anyone responded to you, or randomly tweeted you, by going to Summize.com and entering in your Twitter name into the search tab.

Or, if you are checking on what's being said about your company, your competition, or a product you're wondering about, just put it in quotations (if it's longer than one word) to get an exact match from Summize.com. Just like you would do an exact match search in Google.

Fun, huh?

Are You Neglecting Your Blog for Twitter or Facebook?

I mean really!?! FashionMista.com is sorely neglected, all because I seem to spend extra energy in Twitter or Facebook. The Tweets just don't stop coming - be it the desire to create a Tweet or to read them. What will we do? The blog is so much more powerful, right? Long term links, photos, design, Comments with more links, and more conversations that just stay preserved in the Comment box.

Over at the Home Office Collectives group in Facebook, Carla of the blog RockStarLifeLessons.com pointed out that she too has been neglecting her blog for Twitter, saying: "I am LOVING twitter...to the point that I've been neglecting my blog...I suppose I'll eventually add a widget to my blog so my readers know that I'm still online ;-)"

So this is what it's come to. Widgets. A friend passed me a link once, to a video. Once again, I've sadly misplaced this link, but the guy, who you social techies out there probably know of, was discussing the then new technology to search for feelings on the web. Somehow, I think, this website conjured up lots of words from websites, and put them into one, live space. At the end of the video, he announced that the web page is dead. Not his web page, but the "web page", as in the form.

However, I still have my shopping cart, I still have this blog, people still visit it, link to it, link from it, Retweet it, etc. I still manage pages of other websites and track their traffic patterns. But I need to spend a little more time here, I believe.

Thoughts? Please chime in! ThatITGirl as a blog (not me as a person), is lonely with the neglect of its author! And FashionMista.com - don't get her started. She sees more mobile Flickr photo uploads that she knows what to do with.

Tweetworking (Twitter Networking) and Can Be Good for Business

"Twitter twitter, twitter, twitter twitter."
2:31 PM May 07, 2008 from web

That was my first entry into my Twitter.com account, @ktjames. When I logged in for the first time, I was met with a wall of words, individual conversations between people who referred to themselves with @ in the beginning of their names. Was I, a social networking addict, overwhelmed? Yes! I had been resisting Twitter, despite friends asking to become Twitter friends, because I knew it was such a ... busy place. So I became a fly on the wall, studied everyone's 140 character mini-mini-conversations, and started to converse with them slowly, until I realized that no one was talking back, and I was all alone. It prompted my next entry of brutal honesty:

"Feeling like I have no Twitter friends...talking to no one...can anyone hear me??"
12:53 PM May 09, 2008 from web

Feeling like an avatar lost at sea, I bobbed in an ocean of silence in my home office, waiting, then moved onto other projects. Suddenly, a little email landed in my gmail. It was a private, "DM" (aka Direct Message) from a Twitter friend who I didn't realize was "following" me (aka keeps tabs on all of my tweets). She said that sometimes no one replies, and that it can be lonely. Quite a humble statement from a woman who has plenty of followers herself, and has a big Twitter Star with over 800 followers visiting her, in person, with kids and husband. We are watching/reading the whole road trip on Twitter as the Twitter Star drives with her family and sends Twitters mobile updates from her cell phone.

Then I got another response:
ManicTrout @ktjames I hear ya! 01:56 PM May 09, 2008 from web

and then:

DeAnnaCochran @ktjames I hear ya. Sendin the luv your way :)
01:04 PM May 09, 2008 from web in reply to ktjames

And that's when I realized we were all like truckers on the information super highway, talking on our CBs. Many of us work from home. Many of us have children and work from home. What was once a very solitary place physically, has become a mentally cluttered, clucking place of, in my case, women talking to each other about life, dinner, ever expanding to-do lists, SEO articles, and more.

Is this Twitter a waste of time? It really is IMing on hyperspeed and can rob a lot of your time. Can it help your business? Well, if you look at it from the networking perspective, you are networking with people in other ways than job fairs or trade shows or meetup events. You are networking through your computer in condensed forms, which makes you be direct, to the point, a little witty, and a little honest. Women are very active in social networks, as these demographics from RapLeaf show. In an interview for Ladies Who Launch, Patricia Handschiegel, founder of StyleDaily.com (which she sold to Styehive.com), may have said it best: "The best thing women can do is network. Women entrepreneurs are different. There’s a loyalty between us … an honest bond."

Since then, I have seen my Twitter friends promote each other in wonderful and unexpected ways. They:

• Publicly welcome each other (goal: get more Twitter followers)
• Tinyurl each other, which condenses a long link into a very short link (goal: get traffic to website)
• Visit each other in person (goal: friendship)
• Share quick dinner ideas (goal: eating good food and providing for family)
• Identify with each other over kids or admin requirements (goal: feeling normal)

So should you do it for your business? Sure. How to do it for your business is a whole other article that would talk about finesse and genuine interest in others. It requires creativity in how and what you express to your online friends.

But for now, this business owner is hooked. When did I know I was hooked? When I twittered this:

"Goodnight Twitter! Have a good Midnight Maintenance!"
11:06 PM May 19, 2008 from web