Intro to Hashtagging

Dear World, 

I love you, but I have to talk to you about something. That something is The Hashtag. You know, the little number symbol followed by words? If you've never seen one, you've probably been living under a rock, as they are all over social media these days. The problem is that half the people who use them have no concept of how they're supposed to be used. So here's a quick, kind of mean-sounding instruction manual. Just remember that I love you. 

1. Hashtags were invented for the categorization of posts--not for sentence-long punch lines, no matter how clever or unique they are. In fact, the more unique the hashtag content, the more useless it is. The function of a  hashtag is to link you to other posts or photos with similar content. It really is a pretty neat way of exploring various topics. But if you're tagging things like

#heyitsallgoodivestillgotfivecookieslefteventhoughiatethewholecake, 

you've accomplished nothing. Unless, of course, you use some really out-there hashtag that is only used by one other person in the whole world and you turn out to be soulmates. So if you're goal is to meet your soulmate because of horrible hashtagging, #makelikethesugarhillgangandjumponit

2. This is somewhat related to number 1, but I feel like it needs its own number for some extra emphasis. Much of the humor that may be found in your milelongstringofwordsallsmooshedtogetherlikethis is often lost in the effort to decipher the dern thing. If you wanna be funny, find a way to do it without making a useless, headache-inducing hashtag.

3. On the flip side, #never #tag #every #word #in #a #sentence. That's just as much of a headacher. And really, who is going to want to search something like #a?! 

4. You can't use punctuation in the middle of your hashtags. If you're using them on a social media platform where they're actually functional (see number 5), the linked portion will end at your first punctuation mark. So if I were to write #it'sthemostwonderfultimeoftheyear, the only portion that would be linked to anything would be the #it. I really like proper punctuation, so this kinda makes me sad, but it's a little easier to avoid that sort of thing if you're not going against lessons 1 and 2 in the first place.

5. Hashtags are absolutely useless on facebook.

          Update 6/12/13: According to this article, lesson 5 is no longer true. This just may be what finally breaks my facebook addiction.

#runandtellthat