If you're new to Twitter, it can be a little daunting if you only use Facebook usually, and more so if you haven't used any form of Social Media media before- but don't worry, it's not brain surgery, anyone can get their head around it and before her departure from this mortal coil, Ivy Bean was Twitter's oldest user at a rather grand 104 years old.
When you log into Twitter, and look at your newsfeed (you will have an account set up already if you have purchased a website from us), you'll see what everyone else has tweeted and sometimes, you'll see some hastags (These things: #) too. Common ones are usually things like '#JustSaying' or #IHateMondays' and most TV programmes now have hashtags at the beginning to encourage users to talk about the shows on Twitter (#Panarama, #RoadWars, #BBBOTS, etc.).
Hashtags before words or phrases are used to help Twitter users discover tweets on a specific topic. For example, if you want to search for #Cuckoo (the show on BBC3- if you haven't watched it yet, you're really missing out), then you type 'Cuckoo' into your search bar on Twitter and it'll pull up every single tweet written about the show.
What it won't do is pull up tweets like 'I just saw a cuckoo in my garden' because the word is not preceded by the hash tag.
You don't have to use a # in your main message, you can always pop it on the end of your tweet, like this:
'Greg Davies is a comedy legend! #Cuckoo'
And you can use more than one # too, like:
'Greg Davies is a #comedy #legend! #Cuckoo'
Pretty much anything can be a hashtag, and some users have tried deliberately starting their own hashtags, by tweeting it and encouraging their users to retweet it to their own followers and writer their own version. There's lot's of examples of these, such as:
#WhenDidItBecomeCool
#RandomThoughts
#DoYouSeeWhatIDidThere
#DearYoungSelf
They're very useful if you're travelling too. If you drive, like Technician Tim, and you get caught in a traffic jam on the A666, you can type in 'A666' into the search bar to search for tweets from other users who are stuck in the same problem- maybe they can see from the front what's going on and why you're all stuck there.
Equally, if you're a lowly, non-driving pedestrian like EJ, you'll understand that public transport, and especially trains don't always run on time. In case like that, you could search for '1440Manchester' and find out why the 14.40 to Manchester is not where it should be.
Twitter hashtags are useful to garner responses from large companies such as BT, Pizza Hut, Vodaphone and the like. Many large companies now employ someone to run their Twitter accounts and often problems can be sorted out via Twitter without you having to ring a call centre halfway around the world.
So you see, hashtags are a way of allowing your tweets to be found by other users who are interested in the same subject you've tweeted about.