Twitter has emerged as a popular source of sharing and delivering news information. In tweet messages, URLs to web resources and hashtags are often included. This study investigates the potential of the hyperlinks and hashtags as topical clues and indicators to tweet messages. For this study, we crawled and analyzed about 1.5 million tweets for a 3‐month period covering any topic or subject. The findings of this study revealed a power law relationship for the ranking and frequency of (a) the host names of URLs, and (b) a pair of hashtags and URLs that appeared in the tweet messages. This study also discovered that the most popular URLs used in tweets come from news and media websites, and a majority of the hyperlinked resources are news web pages. One implication of this study is that Twitter users are becoming more active in sharing already published information than producing new information. Finally, our investigation on hashtags for web resource indexing reveals that hashtags have the potential to be used as indexing terms for co‐occurring URLs in the same tweet. We also discuss the implications of this study for web resource recommendation.