If you are new to using social media, you probably don’t know about the world of hashtags! Short links starting with the pound sign “#” allow you to find content surrounding a keyword.
Hashtags work across all social media platforms. They help organize content or track discussion topics. You can search your favorite TV show, or a politician, or your favorite brand, and then click on the hashtag to see all the posts that mention the subject in real time. If you want to know about traveling simply use the hashtag #travel.
The key to using #Hashtags, is there are no spaces. Even if your hashtag contains multiple words, you simply group them together with no spaces for example Shopping Annuity would be #ShoppingAnnuity. Hashtags are not case sensitive so it doesn’t matter if some letters are capitalized and others aren’t.
Unfortunately you cannot use punctuation or numbers in your hashtag search. That means no periods, asterisks, underscores, question marks, etc. The fun thing about hashtags is, while you can use it to find a common topic in the online community, the use of hashtags is open to anyone to create! You can completely make up your own hashtag.
Hashtags have become widely used, some popular hashtags include: #TBT or #ThrowbackThursday, #FBF or #FlaskbackFriday #MCM or #Mancrushmonday, #WCW or #Womancrushwednesday.
It’s important to remember that your use of hashtag’s also relies on your privacy settings on social media. So if you have a private profile, only your friends will be able to see your hashtag. For example when you add a hashtag on Facebook, the post will be shared with people who are your friends, if you post to the public, than the public can see your post.
Keep in mind if you use a hashtag in a post you share to Public, and allow people to follow you, your post will appear on your public profile and in that hashtag’s feed.
When using hashtags you should be specific in your hashtag – for example instead of using #newyorkcity use #manhattan or instead of using #uspresident use #obama. Make sure you keep your hashtag’s simple: Don’t overuse hashtags, there is no need to use the same hashtag twice in one sentence it’s redundant. When writing a post make sure to include the context of your hashtag: a good example is – “I bought a new blender on #Shopcom to fund my #shoppingannuity.”
So to summarize:
- Don’t be too wordy when using a single hashtag.
- If you tweet with a hashtag on a public account, anyone who does a search for that hashtag may find your tweet.
- Don’t #spam #with #hashtags. It’s annoying.
- Use hashtags that are relevant to the topic you are writing about
