Why Twitter hashtags are still important

by Stii

Hashtags.org died. With it’s death it seems the need for hashtags for Twitter also died. Or did it? Some people were quite vocal that it is dumb to still use hashtags. It is NOT! Hashtags sure as hell is very much needed! Lets look at an example:

I did a search on twitter for COPE, as in the political party. If I search for COPE by simply entering the word without the # it returns thousand and thousands of results. Some relevant to the political party, some not. You get a lot of noise like:
“Yeah, I’m really getting into this slacker European thing. I don’t know how I’ll cope in January with no more holidays.”
and
“Eventually got to the office… Damn trains… When will they learn to cope with British weather? #britishrail”
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=cope

Now if one do exactly the same search for #COPE then you get a lot less results since most people stopped using hashtags, but all of it relevant to the political party!
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=#cope

So pretty please, with mayonnaise on top, please start using it again!