These days, every important cause needs a hashtag to be visible in the world of social media, and with the Christie administration announcing its intention to close 15 more schools in Newark as the next step in its attack on public education in urban communities, cause visibility is greatly needed.
A hashtag is the # symbol when it’s used in tweets or Facebook posts. Short hashtags are great because Twitter gives you only 140 characters to express whatever you want to say. #saveNPS is not actively being used for any other campaign, so how grabbing it for the Save Newark Public Schools Campaign?
How you use the #saveNPS hashtag: In every Facebook post or tweet you make about Newark public schools, work the character string #saveNPS into it. Put it in the beginning, end or middle of a tweet or post. As long as it’s there, when someone searches on this term your post/tweet will be included in their list of results. Case is irrelevant to hashtag searches, so you can use #savenps too.
The purpose of a hashtag? Urban Dictionary gives a good definition:
If you have been on Twitter, you may have seen a “hashtag.” To put it simply, a hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic and to begin a conversation. For example, if you search on #LOST (or #Lost or #lost, because it’s not case-sensitive), you’ll get a list of tweets related to the TV show. What you won’t get are tweets that say “I lost my wallet yesterday” because “lost” isn’t preceded by the hash tag.