On Twitter, the use of hashtags has seemingly evolved from a good way to group content of a similar category together, to a messy way to group content or a good way to make a joke. Either way, that’s probably not how hashtags were intended.

Katie Rose, of Business2Community, seems to take particular offense to this “hashtag abuse”. There can be some value in using hashtags more properly, however.

The best nugget I gleaned from the above article is that, if you want your audience to congregate together, show them the way. Whether from your site, a YouTube video or even from your physical business place, suggest a hashtag for users to use when talking about you and your business. Otherwise, you never know all the various combinations people will create for essentially the same thing.

This makes it much easier for users to use hashtags, rather than Twitter’s search function.