What's a Hashtag and How can you use it to Follow my Journey?

Hi Everyone,

Since I announced on twitter what the Hashtag would be to enable you to follow me on my journey through India, I have been asked What is a Hashtag and How do you use it? So here is an explanation and details to get you started -

Firstly if you haven't got an account on Twitter then you will need to sign up for one, it's free and easy. Once you have an account you can then follow me by clicking on 'follow me on twitter' half way down the right hand column on this blog.
So, what is a hashtag? It is a way of being able to organise specific topics and events on twitter into one group. Once a tweet includes a hashtag it can then be easily found by typing in the hashtag into 'twitter search' and anyone can send a tweet including the hashtag so that it shows up within that group. Let's just go back one step and explain what a tweet is for those that have just or are about to set up a twitter account. A tweet is a short message of no-more than 140 characters which is posted on your twitter page for anyone who is 'following' you to see. I'll leave it at that for now but just to let you know that you can send your tweets to other sites such as facebook, so they're a very handy way of typing a short message once and then having it displayed in numerous sites. Cool Eh!
Now that you know what a tweet is, what the heck do you tweet about? Well anything and everything. Let's give you a couple of examples - earlier I sent a tweet saying I was playing on the Wii with my son. Why? you may ask. I look at twitter as a way of 1. expressing myself 2. for others to get to know who I am, what I like and what I do and 3. providing information. By doing this, people will be able to relate to me, get to know me and trust me. From this point onwards a mutually beneficial relationship maybe formed for friendship, business or both. Once I have finished this post, I will then tweet that there is an update to my blog and you may be reading this due to the tweet I sent. So there are many different reasons why you would tweet and all I would say is embrace it, sign up to it and give it time. You will soon see the benefits.
Hopefully you now have a better understanding of twitter and tweets, so we'll now carry on with How to use Hastags. Let's take the hashtag I have created for my trip across India -

#richinindia - this can now be typed within a tweet, so that it will then be grouped with all the other tweets with that hashtag in. For example -

I may post a tweet - 'very hot today and covered 100 miles' this would just go out as a standard tweet and wouldn't be easily searchable or be assigned to anything specific. However if I typed - '#richinindia very hot today and covered 100 miles' this will now be assigned to the group of tweets that includes #richinindia. It will be easily searchable and anyone would be able to reply or add their own comment by including the same hashtag.

(side note: the hashtag may be typed anywhere within the tweet, not neccessarily at the beginning)

So that hopefully explains what are and how to use hashtags. If you're still unsure or are unable to find my stream of tweets with the #richinindia hashtag, then please get in touch and I'll do what I can to help.

Just to conlude, here is are the 4 steps you need to take to follow and interact with me -

1. sign up to Twitter
2. Follow me
3. type #richinindia into search on your twitter page
4. send a tweet with #richinindia included

I hope this helps and look forward to hearing from you on my journey.

All the best,

Rich