Hash tags may be the answer....but what is the question?

I have been doing a bit of research into how I grow my audience for this bizarre use of my time (by that I mean blogging). Not that it really matters who reads this (although I am eternally grateful to all of you who do) as I write it, primarily, for myself. My audience figures have built up a fair bit over the past 7 months and this is almost entirely down to Facebook, Twitter and help from from my tweeting pals and fellow facebookers retweeting and sharing my posts. However, I am trying to find new ways to get new people involved that does not rely on my friends doing all the work for me.

So today I tried using hash tags on Twitter. I am not very good at hash tags. I have friends who do the most elaborate hash tags which are, obviously, just meant to be amusing at the end of a tweet and not so people can find that persons tweet when they are searching for summat. Does that make sense?

My last post (see here if you haven't read it) was about Welsh lovely, Katherine Jenkins with shout outs to Susan Boyle and Paul Potts. I was quite pleased with it as a Diary Entry (I am not always happy with the dross I subject you to) so I thought it would be a good post to use in an effort to get strangers to read and thus encourage them to visit my Diary on a regular basis.

I retweeted my post about 7 minutes ago and since doing it 4 people that have not read that post before have read that post now. Of course those people could just be followers of mine on Twitter who had managed to evade my bombardment of tweets begging people to read my latest arrangement of words. However, they could have been people who had searched for the subjects of my hash tags which would be very exciting (more so for me than you). Of course 7 minutes is not enough time to gauge the difference a well placed hash tag on Twitter might make so I am going to leave this Diary Entry for a while and come back to you after my Zumba class so I can get a better idea if hash tags are the future. 

So it is now 3 hours later and I can tell you that 3 more people (that is 7 more in total) have read my latest Diary Entry since I tweeted with hash tags. Therefore, on the strength of this experiment, hash tags are not the answer and are definitely not the future. Normal service will resume with the next post when we will actually talk about some singing and stuff.