How to Use Hashtags

         




               

About 3 minutes to read this post

Nowadays, hashtags are everywhere. We see them on social networking sites, in adverts, promotions for films premiere and on billboards, hashtags for athletic games, for marriage anniversaries, for beer promotions, the list seems to go on and on. Some people just use it because they saw it somewhere. So, this review is to let everyone know what hashtag is all about. The 10th anniversary of twitter hashtags was on August 23, 2017. Hashtags first came out from twitter and Chris Messina, a social technology expert, is known to be the first person that created the first hashtag – which was #Barcamp. Chris Messina intended to use a hashtag to group tweets around a common theme – a conference. Since then, we have come a long way with hashtag. Users now share an average of 125 million hashtags daily – according to twitter.

Ways to use Hashtags

On twitter for example, one can use hashtag in hope of finding readers and hopes that readers will look out for the hashtag. You can also use hashtag to help people learn about your new book. Let’s say you wrote an ebook on skin care. You can create a post about your new ebook and use the hashtag #SkinCare in hope of finding readers. Readers can also type #SkinCare into the search bar when they look for skin care book to read. This is also true for books that fall into other genres. For example, #Fantasy, #Thriller, #Memoir, #ScienceFiction, etc.

A writer, after writing his blog post can simply hashtag the title of the blog post and then use the hashtag on social media to draw readers. Hashtag has one unique feature, when one clicks a hashtag, he will be directed to a new page on twitter where all the tweets with the same hashtags are found. Hashtags can be good for research. If someone wanted to learn about interior decoration or where to buy items for interior decoration, he can hashtag #InteriorDecoration in the search bar and then click the hashtag in any tweet to find more information. Hashtags can help readers find your post or your product and also attract readers to your tweets.

On twitter, it is important to keep your hashtag to a minimum of two. This is according to Dan Zarrella, a social scientist who wrote the “science of marketing”. He found out that when someone uses more than two hashtags on twitter, retweets decrease. Twitter themselves also recommends that one should restrain to two hashtags per tweet. And also, up to seven or more hashtags makes the tweet to look like a spam! Don’t you think so?

How to create an Hashtag

All words in hashtag must connect with the hashtag symbol. For instance, #Skin care is not a hashtag because the word care is not connected to the word skin. #SkinCare is a hashtag because the word care is connected to the word skin. People make this mistake of using small letters in all the words in a hashtag. Note that the first letter of each word in a hashtag should be capitalized. Hashtags on Instagram are always lowercased. Some hashtags have alternative spellings – #ScienceFiction can be shortened to #SciFi

Some people construct a branded hashtags to track  retweets by using hashtags for celebrities who don’t have a twitter account because they are either dead or have not joined the social network yet. It is advisable to always research the hashtags you make to eradicate the possibility of a double meaning. You can find the meaning of a hashtag at this website called TagDef. If you can’t find it on TagDef, you can Google it.

Other Platforms that supports Hashtag!

             Instagram : They allow up 30 hashtags. When one begins to type a hashtag on Instagram, the platform will suggest hashtags.

              Google +     : Google use hashtag the same way as Twitter. The platform will show you posts that use the same hashtag or use the words in the description, when you type a hashtag in the search bar.

              Facebook    : Facebook introduced hashtag in 2013. It is not very popular on Facebook platform. You can see people create personal hashtags to emphasize a feeling.

              LinkedIn     : LinkedIn do not support hashtags

             Pinterest      : Hashtags were only used in description on Pinterest, but now work just like other platforms