My First Twitter Hashtag ~#savvysaturday

Yesterday when I switched on my laptop and checked my Tweetdeck, I noticed @MariSmith had started a Twitter Hashtag for #followfriday.

Mari Smith is very highly regarded on Twitter and is also know for her intricate Facebook knowledge. Mari is in no way affiliated with Twitter or Facebook and has a very large network on both of these Social Networks.

One of Mari’s popular sites is Why Facebook? which I highly recommend reading if you are building a network for business on Facebook!

It wasn’t the first time I have seen these hashtags and I really wanted to participate in this. Let me tell you what a hashtag is first.

What is a Twitter Hashtag?

A hashtag is when you create a term, tip or even an acronym for an event, preceding the text with a # sign. The idea is to tweet this and get your friends and followers (and other tweeps) involved in creating a conversation around this hashtag, which can become viral! It also allows you to find tweeps (twitter speak for twitter people) interested in the same things as you or who are attending the same event as you. Sounds simple enough.

Here is a video from Mari Smith herself describing exactly what it is and how to follow, participate and create one yourself.

My First Twitter Hashtag

Now it was already Saturday in Australia where I live and tweeted so. What happened next is the reason I am writing this post.

I received an @reply from @wealthydesigner suggesting I start my own hashtag for Saturday. So hence the creation of the hashtag #savvysaturday! I really wasn’t sure what to expect and what I would get out of it to tell you the truth, however, that didn’t stop me. I was experimenting (as you do) and @AmyStark gave me some encouragement!

An easy way to be involved and stay in the conversation is to go to TweetChat dot com and login using your Twitter credentials. Apparently, this is safe to use. Mari does mention this site in her video above.

What Did I Learn?

I managed to make some new “friends” out of it and even had #savvysaturday (follow the conversation here!) show up in Twitscoop and eventually trending! Now that got me excited. (Excited like if your charts were trending in the Stock Market in order to apply some renting strategies).

If you are using Tweetdeck, you can watch Twitscoop in one of your columns if you so desire and it will also depict when a topic goes “hot.”

Twitscoop is the place to find “hot” topics that are being tweeted about on Twitter. I have an upcoming post on Tweetdeck for you so stay tuned.

Examples of trending topics at the moment would be President Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration in a couple of days. Watch Twitter for that one. My bet is that it will be running hot, hot, hot as it did while the US elections were taking place.

What I have described here is one way of starting a trend/conversation on Twitter for getting noticed. It’s something I wouldn’t personally use very often, however, you can see from this post that it could potentially become very viral and reach many tweeps with your message. I would caution you though as a friend that if you did it too often, you could really tick some people off and lose followers depending on your intention.

Have fun creating your own hashtags and I would love to know if you have previously done this or intend to do this. Comments are are always welcomed.