So you’re looking to build up your social networking traffic and you discovered the use of hashtags on your posts? This article isn't about teaching you the benefit of tagging your posts, it's about what they can bring to your business, and the real power behind them for the companies that provide them. It's about what hashtags really are.

To begin, I’ll provide you with a real-world example of a tweet I posted on April Fools Day this year. Microsoft made a little joke and had their old pal Clippy come out and greet folks within the online version of Microsoft Office. Since I thought it was funny, I figured I would post it on Twitter and get a little exposure from this online jab.

I saw this today from #Excel. Good one #Microsoft, scared the heck out of me. #AprilFoolsDay #OneDrive #Office365 pic.twitter.com/G878rj1v7m

I wanted others to see my post too, so I targeted my tags Microsoft, and it being April Fools Day by using #AprilFoolsDay, #OneDrive, #Exel, #Microsoft #Office365 as tags for the post. My hope was that others out there on Twitter would mark their posts with the same tags and we could find each other, or one of us could search on any of those tags and find others posts tagged the same.

Sounds like fun, and it's easy way to target your posts. It's also an easy way for others to find posts that are similar. By tagging you hope to increase the amount of eyes that see the post, and hopefully expose it to even more eyes. If this is a post about your product or website, you might even get some increased exposure for it as well.

Well, that's at the higher level of what tagging content does, but for those sites that employ tagging of their content what does it mean for them? What does Twitter, and all those social outlets get out of providing tagging? It maybe something your company should consider doing with your own content to gain an understanding of the data being collected.

Making Sense of Unstructured Data

So how does tagging of content help your company out? What value does it really have? One of the things with social media outlets and just providing a post, as far as creating relationships with this unstructured data is really hard to do. You could use search technologies, similar to Google, that essentially keyword searches through all that content in hopes you might find related documents. Since the content is being submitted by a bunch of people, from various sources, there really is no consistency with what's being collected, it's really hard to get a grasp of all that data. Keyword searching through it all may come up some related documents, but a bunch of misses since the it all depends on the context of the keyword. For example, say I search for "Microsoft" and "April Fools Day" since I put them in quotes, and used specific phrases, it may bring up something relevant, but it could be form years ago, or who knows what the context may be.

Now let's add in tagging. Tags are added by people and aren't figured out by some piece of software that was created to search through a bunch of unrelated content. Since people adding tags are usually adding something relevant, then if you have two people who posted something tagged "#Microsoft", the content probably has some definite relationship to each other. Further refine the tagging with #AprilFoolDays and you get even more refined results. Add more tags, even further refined. You throw in Tweets being timestamped and then I can pull up timely information as well (see figure below).

Figure: Folks add hashtags to their posts which are added to a central database if it doesn't exist.

Now enter Twitter. Twitter can use this centralized repository of tags to query on, and tag other content like ads, content, which can be targeted to users tagging posts with the same tags. Twitter isn't the only one using the tags, since they make an API available, companies like Klout can provide statistics on who posts tagged content frequently and what topics. Klout can gauge the interaction with other users on those posts, and finally calculate who is influential on the topic based on the interaction of the other users of the community.

Figure: Then Twitter can come and data mine the tags, and associate other content based on the tags.

Making Use of Tags

So what do tags mean for your company? In the content management space, we used taxonomies which are similar to tagging, but more hierarchical in nature for managing unstructured data like web content. Hashtags are a folksonomy which is flat, with each tag being a key to categorize content. For you technical folks, a simple database relationship for building out a tagging structure may look like the following figure:

Figure: Sample data structure for tagging various content types.

So consider the diagram above and what it means for your digital resources; it provides the ability to create relationships where none had existed before. In a B2B or B2C environment this could be allowing your customers tag orders, other information they submit. Then in the back-end you tag other content which provides a picture of your customers, and enables you to provide customers with  a seamless experience. Information is presented to your customers, and they're not clicking around your site to find what it is they're looking for. Information becomes relevant, and not something that a search engine tries to figure out. The more centralized your tagging data becomes, the better the content can be targeted to your users.

There are many uses for this tagging, and even more centralizing of tags can occur using social networks which allow their APIs to be queried for tags. Just think if all the social networks got together and centralized their tagging database, scary, but likely will not happen due to the proprietary nature of the data. But that doesn't stop the aspiring developer to do it using the various APIs the networks expose, kind of like what Klout, Hashtags.org, and many others do.

So now it's just up to you to figure out what to do with this method of making sense of disparate data. Sit down with the content owners, and figure out what relationships make sense to your company. Integrate into your content management system (CMS)(does your CMS support tagging?). Once you have tagging going you've begun to build a digital fingerprint of your customers.