Mark Twain was famous for saying, “If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.” Of course, he did not have twitter to limit his remarks to 140 characters. We do. And, the social media world has embraced the idea of sharing thoughts in 140 chracters or less. That’s not a lot of space. But if you take all those millions and millions of 140 character tweets, you end up saying a lot. Hashtags have become the method of choice for helping to organize all that information. But you want to be careful not to go hashtag crazy.

Recent Twitter stats suggest that we are showing some dicipline in the number of hastags included in tweets. Only 24% of the measured tweets contained hastags. This is a good thing as they can have a big impact on engagement.   Tweets with one or two hashtags have a 21% higher engagement than those with three or more. And, tweets that use more than two hashtags actually show a 17% drop in engagement.

Our advice is to think before you hashtag. Understand why you are you using that hashtag. Does it make the tweet better for your audience? Or does it just clutter up your tweet and make it harder to read?

With hashes:

“Reading about #SEO and #hashtags in #tweets from a #DenverSEO expert.”

Without hashes:

“Reading about SEO and hashtags in tweets from a Denver SEO expert.”

Hashtags are a big help if you are a big tweeter. Adding hashtags on words you frequently talk about can help your followers keep up and find you. For example, of you tweet about SEO a lot, you might want to use or create the hashtag #SEO and use it anytime you tweet about that subject. All those who follow you and are interested in SEO can see your tweets.