Twitter wants to help users of its social media service better understand hashtags. It has unveiled a trial feature to assist users with the special tagging feature that has become commonplace for many users online.
Now, when users search a hashtag, Twitter will also display an explanation of it as well as tweets that are associated with it. The new feature was rolled out on Friday.
The change was rolled out for the Twitter iPhone app, according to a report. Twitter may not have an explanation for every hashtag out there, however. Some of the following hashtags that involve significant world events or discussions have not been included in the hashtag help function: #NotOneMore, for use in discussions against gun violence after a deady Santa Barbara shooting; #ConfessionNight, used for tweeting secret confessions; or #MH17, reffering to the Malaysia Airlines plane that crashed in Ukraine a month ago.
Tweets often use hashtags with abbreviated phrases that appear to other Twitter users involved in a particular discussion. Twitter is active in developing its site to be helpful in social tagging functions and is constantly looking to improve the site's performance and popularity. For example, #oitnb is the hashtag for discussions about "Orange is the New Black," a topic that relates to a popular Netflix series, as one report notes.
It is not yet known when or if the update will apply to Android and other platforms. Mobile social media use is on the rise, as is evident with the success of mobile social media ads on both Facebook and Twitter. The hashtags help people join conversations, which is a major driver of the Twitter platform. Users do not need to follow a specific person if they are searching a specific hashtag.
The new hashtag update may also not be immediately available to every Twitter user, as one recent report finds. As is the case with many Twitter updates, they are often only unleashed to a limited number of users before going completely mainstream. This is a good way to measure effectiveness and avoid bugs. It is a testing phase for Twitter.
Twitter's stock recently soared after the service received huge boosts in traffic during the FIFA Soccer World Cup tournament, thanks to Twitter's special hashtagging of soccer terms for fans and teams of the sport, as a previous Tech Times report pointed out last month.
Twitter will likely continue a strategy of providing ways to help users navigate and understand the social network. The company is looking to gain more new users to satisfy its investors, many of whom were previously concerned that the company may have been losing its social media relevance. The World Cup hashtags proved to be useful for the company in measuring its strategy. Hashtags are key and Twitter will likely continue to try to get users involved in its service by familiarizing more people with the application.
