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Hashtags can help add value to your brand and expand your visibility quickly.

On Twitter, hashtags are fun little tools for tracking topics, conversations, communities and live events. One popular (almost old) hashtag is #followfriday.  This is where people recommend other people that you should follow.  So they’d list the twitter id of a person and include the hashtag at the end of the post. For instance, if someone was recommending me, they would tweet my user id plus #followfriday (and maybe they’d include a note saying, “follow her, she’s great”).

Personally, I don’t go looking for hashtags. They are usually already attached to a conversation that I want to add to. However, here are a few hashtag resources: 

• #hashtags.org is the first place to find most recent and hot hashtags with popularity trends.
• Twemes.com is another useful resource for discovering and tracking new hashtags. It has a hashtag cloud.
• Wthashtag.com is a user generated wiki of hashtags. If you don’t know what any hashtag means or how to use it, you can use the site search and get a well-compiled entry explaining the meaning of the hashtag

Coaches, consultants and community leaders use hashtags to connect others to their niche, topic, club or challenge.  Talk about unleashing a viral effect around a topic– it does!  If the topic is something I’m interested in, I just jump right in.

As a coach/consultant, you make it easy for your followers and club members to converse with each other and hold each other accountable. For example,Jeff Herring created a challenge called 100articles100days.  He  set up the hashtag #HAHD to make it easy for participants to hold each other accountable, encourage each other and follow the conversation.  Within two weeks, the club had drawn close to 800 members as a result of the buzz created using a simple hashtag.