How much attention do you pay to hashtags in your tweets?

[MarieHaynes]

I haven't really paid much attention to adding hashtags to my tweets, but I'm thinking I should.

For my real estate site I just started following the mayor of our city.  I noticed that he finishes each of his tweets with #ourcityname.  I clicked on the hashtag because I wanted to find more people who tweet about our city.  Then, I suddenly realized that if I used that hashtag when I tweet then other people would find me and follow me.

Any thoughts?

[wildnerakademie]

Hashtags in tweets are important, but try not to oweruse them. #It #kind of #look silly, when nearly every #word has a #hashtag. So put the hashtag once or twice in a tweet. Many Twitter-user do searches.

[TKIGWebTeam]

"So put the hashtag once or twice in a tweet. Many Twitter-user do searches."

Agree. Using them a few times to help make them more visible for certain subject matter is really important. I have been known to use 3 or 4 "hashtags" in a single 'tweet,' but I wouldn't recommend doing it on a regular basis. It seems to take away from the professionalism of your 'tweet.'

[aaorose]

Hashtags are extremely useful and one of the unique elements of Twitter that makes it so useful. You can set up search queries to automatically list all hashtags in separate lists (these would be topics you would be interested in following) and find new people to follow by searching for hashtags in Twitters search box. In the inverse, you make yourself findable, and more likely to be followed, if you include hashtags in your tweets. Include a hashtag for the topic or subject for which you want to be found - it could be industry (#realestate or #realtor) or your location #cityname or a combo - #cityrealestate. Simply do a search and see what people are tagging. I use Tweetdeck to track my industry hashtags.

[firstconversion]

I rarely pay any attention to them

[jennita]

I can't remember which conference it was at the moment, but a Googler talked about how if you have too many hashtags they see that as spam and it might not make it into the real time search. I know some people just have fun with the hashtags, but we use them in our tweets for things like #SEO #socialmedia #analytics, etc whenver it makes sense.