One of Twitter’s main strengths is its connectivity. When you post something, you can connect directly with other people with @ signs or through networks of people through hashtags (or # signs). People click on tagged words to find other related tweets instantly. Creating a hashtag is a fluid thing, formed through community convention and practicality. But here’s a few things to keep in mind.

1. They must be short

Good hashtags are as short as possible because they shouldn’t eat up characters. This results in things like #ldont for London, Ontario, and #UWO for the University of Western Ontario. In my circles, a debate formed over the #UWO hashtag because Western’s account uses #westernu. Obviously the shorter one is preferred, and thus used, but this brings us to number two.

2. They must be unique

Good hashtags can’t conflict with other topics. With #UWO, there’s also the University of Wisconsin, which might also use #UWO. Or take #USC, which in my circles easily stands for the University Students’ Council, but in the US stands for the University of Southern California, or USC.

In the first case, U of Wisconsin is prone to using #wisc more than #UWO, so the conflict was negligible. But with #USC, the twitterflow is overrun with posts from California. This nullifies the entire purpose of a hashtag! The hashtag is used like a search keyword for people to find other tweets related to that topic. So why use #USC to talk about student politics when all you’re going to get is football updates?

3. They can be funny

The other common use of hashtags is humour. From what I gather, it involves tagging something ridiculous that no one else is likely to tweet about. When I changed #USC to #UWOUSC, a Twitter follower said we should make it #UWO_USC to keep with a “institution_division” structure of similar hashtags. She followed this with #wowsonerdy. Needless to say, she’s the only one using that hashtag.