GlobeSt.com frequenters may have noticed a temporary addition to our Washington DC page in the past week. (Hint: it’s a Twitter box.) During the recent RealShare Apartments East conference, we encouraged participants, attendees and even those simply following our Twitter feeds to employ a hashtag phrase using the "#" symbol alongside Tweets relevant to the conference. This took the form of insights directly at the event or articles that were somehow connected to commercial real estate or RealShare itself.

"But wait," I hear you cry, "Why use this "#" as part of a tweet? What does it mean?"

According to the official Twitter help center – a demystifier of all things tweet-related - the "#" is used to "mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages." In other words, adding the hashtag before a word or phrase makes it stand out, gives meaning to the Tweet and allows users to search specifically for messages with the same phrase.