With Twitter as one of the top social media outlets, it is important to learn best practices so you can experience the full benefits. Let’s start with “hashtag” – a word or phrase characterized by the pound sign (#) in front of it, #hashtag. “Tweeters” use hashtags for a variety of reasons, such as search mechanisms, categorizing and for marketing campaigns.

Check out this list of reasons to use hashtags, put together by Mashable:

• Seek business-specific conversations – through the Twitter search bar, you can find hashtags and follow certain trends or learn what other companies are discussing.

• Keep it simple and consistent – #apps and #smallbiz are better than #smallbusinessappsandtools.

• Create your own hashtag – it is a great way to create buzz for your product or company. Ask your followers to tweet certain phrases and offer incentives for doing so!

• Organize social dashboards by hashtag – use websites like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to organize your tweets, retweets, mentions and replies in one place.

To read the full article from Mashable, click here.