It's All About the Hashtag

By Miriam Lamey

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GlobeSt.com frequenters may have noticed a temporary addition to our Washington DC page in the past week. (Hint: it’s a Twitter box.) During the recent RealShare Apartments East conference, we encouraged participants, attendees and even those simply following our Twitter feeds to employ a hashtag phrase using the "#" symbol alongside Tweets relevant to the conference. This took the form of insights directly at the event or articles that were somehow connected to commercial real estate or RealShare itself.

"But wait," I hear you cry, "Why use this "#" as part of a tweet? What does it mean?"

According to the official Twitter help center – a demystifier of all things tweet-related - the "#" is used to "mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages." In other words, adding the hashtag before a word or phrase makes it stand out, gives meaning to the Tweet and allows users to search specifically for messages with the same phrase.

Twitter further explains the use of this symbol simply: "@twitter added the hashtag before the phrase 'thankyousteve'. The word is now a link to search results for all Tweets containing '#thankyousteve' in the message."

Those who follow @GlobeStcom on Twitter (and if you don't, what are you waiting for?) may notice that a lot of messages include #CRE at the end. This marks them, obviously, as commercial real estate-related. Depending on the Tweet, it can be advantageous to add a second tag, such as #multifamily, #NYC or #distressed. This inclusion anticipates who may be searching for specific messages and hopefully brings the right messages more directly to the right Twitter user. At RealShare, all tweets from the conference included #apte12. Individuals present who were directly tweeting  had the opportunity to mark their messages with this tag. Others who wanted to follow the discussions could search for this particular "#" and see real-time updates on panels, scheduling and anything else that conference attendees wished to share.

So how can professionals utilize hashtags to their advantage? Why would anyone in commercial real estate be interested? One answer comes directly from RealShare and the use of "#apte12". Anyone unable to attend a specific event can look and see if organizers chose a special hashtag to provide real-time updates as to the action. This also happened with the recent MBA CREF conference. "#CREF12" was the associated hashtag to the proceedings. Twitter users hoping to relay information from the talks, or even mark articles and coverage could then use the special tag.

In other words, when it’s not possible to travel to each event, there’s no reason why you still can’t glean a strong sense of the experience from Twitter by following remotely (as unlikely to some as that may seem).

It's interesting, really, how a simple "#" can suddenly acquire the potential for influence and power when used just the right way.

If you use Twitter, how do you select hashtags? Have you ever followed an event remotely after learning of a particular “#” and associated phrase?

(To search across all ALM blogs, go to www.Lexis.com.)