Does the right hashtag make a tweet a success?

You know you have to be pithy in a 140-character tweet. But now you’ve got a whole new headache when feeding that cursed Twitter beast.

That hashtag, it seems, really matters.

In a piece titled “the art of the pithy hashtag,” Catrin Nye of the BBC Asian Network informs us that there is a drive to succinctly summarize a hot topic with the perfect hashtag.

Among the “more obvious” (in Britain, anyway) are #hackgate, for the News of the World cell phone hacking scandal, and #1yeartogo, a London Olympics hashtag. Its creator apparently didn’t grasp it would become more obsolete by the day.

If you want to exhaust a disproportionate share of your allotted characters, add #thingswelearnedontwitter, and your pearls of wisdom will end up among tweets like this: “people really like to take pictures of their food.” (Do they, now?) The popularity of #getsonmynerves suggests that chronicling trivial nuisances remains a pastime of many whose blood pressure could use a jolt of adrenaline.