Twitter Hashtags for Writers

Once the writing is done, all authors want is to find readers who will appreciate and enjoy our work. As such, it’s no surprise that social media becomes a topic of conversation, and a focus for us. Social media sites, like Facebook, and Twitter, boast millions of users gathering together to talk culture, and other things they enjoy. Things get passed around, and can go “viral,” or get a ton of exposure. In this blog post I am going to talk a little bit about Twitter, a social media site that allows users to make posts, or comments that are 117/118 characters long, depending on the kind of link you may include in the post. That might sound easy, but getting what you want to say out in 117 characters (not words) can be a little more challenging than you might think. Twitter’s character restriction has resulted in some interesting developments. Not only do users abbreviate what they say, but they also make use of Twitter’s hashtag system. What’s a hashtag? Well, technically its this symbol “#.” It kind of reminds me of hash browns, but you may be more familiar with it as the number sign. The hashtag is a way that twitter buckets or categorizes topics for indexed curation. Users can create and search for hashtags, and thereby find information and interact with others on topics that interest them, like reading, or writing, for example. The evolution of the ‘tweet’ on twitter, then, is that people will insert hashtags in their posts as if they were normal English. For example, this could easily be a modern tweet – Check out this #free #ebook on #kindle [link to book] In general, hashtags are used for:

Finding Experts (#AskAgent #Storycraft)
Recommending Products (#BookGiveaway #BestRead)
Identifying Brands (#Nike #eBay)
Connecting with others that have similar interests (#angels #Utahjazz)
Showing Emotions (#Highfive #OhNoHeDidnt)
Chats that have an understood day/time set aside for posts (#scifichat #scribechat)

To save you time in searching for a bunch of relevant hashtags that you can use to find readers to connect with, I’ve collected a list of Twitter hashtags for writers. If you are aware of any that I missed, please let me know in the comments!