The very nature of social media is the ability to interact with others using highly accessible, simple to use channels such as Twitter. The amount of people you interact with, however, usually depends on how many "followers" or "friends" you are able to attract to those channels.

But suppose you witnessed an event or a happening that urgently needed broadcasting to more than just your followers - what would you do? That's just what Nate Ritter was thinking about as he watched the San Diego fires in 2007. The solution? Hashtags.

Hashtags are used as a way to categorize information over Twitter so that others can track tweets related to a specific topic. You can create a hashtag by prefacing a word with the pound - or "hash" - symbol. For example, to create a hashtag about dogs, you might put the string "#dogs" in your tweets. Nate Ritter used the hashtag #sandiegofire to provide real time updates to people that wanted more information about the fires as they occurred. To track hashtags, you need only to follow @hashtags on Twitter.

For a small business owner, hashtags can be a powerful resource - consider using them if you are presenting a live webinar and you want a broad audience to track your contextual updates. Promoting new product launches or events are perfect for hashtagging - especially if your audience is looking to get information in a timely fashion.

No matter how you use hashtags, they are a handy tool that small business owners are frequently leveraging as a way to connect with people that have a shared interest.