Want to tap into the larger Twitter world and reach people beyond your followers?  Hashtags are your key to the Twitterverse, and keywords are the spare keys you hide under the false rock in your garden.

Hashtags are words with a # in front of them. You will often see multiple words strung together into one, almost unintelligible, jumble of letters.  For instance #deletemynumberif, which is trending as I write this. If you were to space this out it would read “delete my number if”.  To make it easier to differentiate words, people will often capitalize the beginning of each word. The tag would then look like: #DeleteMyNumberIf. This makes it easier to read when stringing the words together.

What makes hashtags such a powerful tool is that they are easy to track and easy to follow. When someone uses one in a post, you can just click the tag and it will show you all the other tweets using that same tag. You can also search for specific hashtags. There is a website that shows you the popularity, and rate of posting, of hashtags. Go to Hashtag.org to see the influence of any hashtag.

Here is a list of popular hashtags and their rate for being tweeted. Now, .07% might seem low, but the average number of tweets sent per day is 140 million. So .07% is 98,000 tweets – and that’s a lot!

• #TittyTuesday .07%
• #Sexy #.25%
• #FollowFriday .09%
• #FF 1.73% (this is a more popular hashtag for #FollowFriday)

Keywords are searchable, but not clickable. This means you can use Twitter search to look for the keywords, but if you use them in a post they will not be clickable.  One thing nice about keywords is that they do not have to be pushed together to form one nearly illegible word, they can be a series of words with spaces. This also means they are harder to spot as being keywords. However, if you use good keywords you can tap into some great trending topics.

Another way to tap into trending topics is to look at your Twitter feed. On the right side menu, there is a topic called “Trending” that will show you what is currently trending.  You can also go to sites like WhatTheTrend.com to see this. The site will also tell you why something is trending. For instance, “Hard Nipples” is trending. Well, you might think, of course it is trending! Who doesn’t like hard nipples?  Well this is not trending because of any Twitter After Dark action.  It is trending because a judge from America’s Best Dance Crew said something about his nipples getting hard in response to a pole dance. Ok, so maybe it should be a part of Twitter After Dark.

But just because it does not originate in adult does not mean that you can’t capitalize on it.  You have an audience that is specifically paying attention to this keyword. Tweet it out and use the keyword; you might reach an audience you don’t normally get to talk to.

Keywords and hashtags are significantly under used in adult tweets.  If you want to reach your audience, and broaden your audience, be strategic – use hashtags and keywords!