Using hashtags on social media is a great way to find specific information and effective use of hashtags will make your life easier when searching, and or promoting content.

Hashtags allow YOU to create a community of people interested in the same topic by making it easier for them to find and share information related to it. Consider the recent popularity of the #PhysEdSummit hashtag. It was great for promoting sessions, sharing links and allowing interested people to engage in conversation.

When creating your own hashtag, or looking to tag specific material it is important to ensure that your hashtag is specific enough that people searching for your content will find what they are looking for. For example, SHAPE America wouldn’t tag their tweets with just the #shape hashtag unless they also wanted their followers to see tweets from #Shape magazine, people tweeting about getting in #shape and math teachers sharing their lessons on teaching the concept of #shape. Therefore, if I wanted to share information from my health classes and wanted other teachers to find them, I would consider using the #healthed hashtag. Tagging it with just #health runs the risk of my tweet getting lost among the quagmire of health focused tweets. At the time of writing this post, the top #health tweet is about camel milk!

Let’s look at 10 of the hashtags currently being tweeted by SHAPE America:

#SHAPEPodcast – links to the awesome podcast from SHAPE hosted by Matt and Collin.

#espechat – the awesome elementary school PE chat. Check out their page!

#physed – all things related to teaching physical education.

#healthed – all things related to teaching health education. One of my most searched for hashtags!

#pegeeks – a celebration of the collective nerdiness of PE teachers on Twitter.

#ProtectPE – sharing advocacy information to ensure that there is #PE4All.

#ESSA – essential information regarding the ever-moving goalposts regarding ESSA.

#schoolhealth – popular hashtag that overlaps between health within and outside of the classroom. Popular with the good people from  ASHA and ETR, also RN’s.

#FoodFri – food and nutrition advocacy tweets pushed out on Fridays.

#QPE – shouting out the world about all that is QUALITY PHYSICAL EDUCATION.

So, be mindful of any hashtag that you plan on using or creating. Taking a little time to find out which hashtags already exist will make sure that you or your followers will find exactly what they are looking for. A conversation that I had recently prompted me to wonder what would be the best hashtag to use if I wanted to share a great tweet about skills based health education. I’ll post my tweeted poll here but will replace it with an image of the results as soon as the poll closes in a week.

All of the hashtags mentioned above are live links! Tap on them to find out if that tweet is worth checking out on a regular basis. Also, consider checking out my favorite, self-created hashtag #sendateacher . Created to raise awareness of the fund-raising initiative that aims to #sendateacher to #SHAPEBoston through the selling of teacher designed t-shirts available at www.sendateacher.com .

Here are this week’s #slowchathealth questions. Released daily, you can ask them when they are tweeted out, or answer them all at once. Consider following those that join in with the conversation:

Q1 How do you use hashtags to collate useful information? #slowchathealth

Q2 Please vote in the hashtag survey https://twitter.com/carmelhealth/status/771355774882840576 #slowchathealth

Q3 What #healthed related hashtags do you follow? #slowchathealth