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How good is your #hashtag game? http://ift.tt/2oEqnRb When, why, and how should you use hashtags on social media? We can help you answer that! The hashtag is a powerful tool for categorizing content, finding and participating in discussions, and organizing communication around a specific topic. It's also — depending on who you ask — a silly tool for brands and social media influencers to get more engagement (likes, views, retweets, shares, etc.) for their advertisements and posts. No matter how you feel about #hashtags, one thing's for sure: They're part of our modern culture — especially in media. You'd be hard-pressed to find a news broadcast, advertisement, or media promo that didn't include a hashtag somewhere. Put simply, there's no escaping hashtags so why not learn a little about them? The history of hashtagsThe first hashtag is said to have been created in August 2007 by Chris Messina. Messina was looking for a way to group related tweets together so folks could tune in and participate in discussions around particular topics and events.
Nearly 10 years later, we're still using hashtags in much the same way: You write a tweet or a Facebook post about a particular topic, add a hashtag, and send your thoughts out into the internet; someone comes across the hashtag or searches for it and they can see your tweet or post, as well as any other tweets or posts using the same hashtag. It's simple, it's elegant, and it's pretty damned ingenious if you ask me! Since the inception of the hashtag, the tool's use has morphed. You can use 'em to be silly and ironic, you can use 'em to spark conversation with strangers, you can use 'em for participating in national events, and you can use 'em to help others find (or hide) your posts. Yep, hashtags are pretty powerful. How to use hashtags without driving your friends crazyHashtags are beautiful in their simplicity and universality. If a site supports hashtags, using them is simple: You simply need to add a pound symbol (#) before the word or words that you want to make your hashtag. Think of hashtags like keywords: short nouns and adjectives to describe the content you're sharing. You'll need to practice a little empathy, because your goal is to hashtag (yes, it can be used as a verb) your posts with keywords that you think others would associate with your content. In this tweet, for example, we wanted to make sure when people were looking for posts about the Nintendo Switch they could find our how-to on creating a Nintendo Switch Dock sock. Because hashtags can only be a group of characters without spaces or punctuation (
In this Instagram post, I wanted people searching for posts about The Office to be able to find my HILARIOUS prank. I knew "office" wasn't going to be specific enough — that hashtag often leads to photos of peoples' home offices, stationary, etc. I took the title of the show and combined the words (remember, hashtags can't have punctuation or spaces) to create the hashtag
Generally speaking, you can use this same thought process when creating hashtags on any social media site. Whether your hashtag is one word ( Some Site-Specific Hashtag TipsDifferent social media sites have different hashtag etiquette. You can choose to follow these pseudo-rules and suggestions or ignore them completely — it's entirely up to you! Your social media presence is your own and you should feel free to run things how you choose. I have to admit, I try to avoid hashtagging on Twitter as much as possible. When I first joined Twitter in late 2008, I can remember being staunchly anti-hashtag. Hashtags get a bad rap due to their association with brands and — sigh — growth-hacking. Nefarious folks will add popular hashtags to their posts even if they're unrelated, because they know more people will see it. Pro tip: Don't do that. Here are some quick tips for hashtagging on Twitter:
Facebook jumped on the hashtag train long after Twitter and it's still pretty rare (for me, at least) to see a regular user hashtagging their Facebook posts. That said, Facebook supports hashtags and you should definitely use them as you see fit! Here are some quick tips for hashtagging on Facebook:
Instagram is all about the hashtag. When you're looking for adorable dog photos, new recipes, craft ideas, etc., chances are you're finding these posts based on hashtags. Your Instagram hashtag game will determine who comes across your posts and how frequently they do. Here are some quick tips for hashtagging on Instagram:
Other tipsThere are plenty of other social media sites that support hashtags and have their own rules surrounding their use. If you use the tips I've mentioned above to help inform your hashtagging technique on other sites, I think it'll go swimmingly. The most important thing you can do is know what kind of post you're creating and what you hope to gain by using hashtags. Once you've got that figured out, you can decide whether you need loads of keyword hashtags, a couple topic hashtags, or a sprinkling of ironic hashtags. Questions?There's a lot to consider when you're using hashtags (not least of which is whether you want to use hashtags in the first place)! If you have any particular questions or need any clarification, leave a comment below or shoot me a message over on Twitter so we can … ?➡️? … hash it out. Gadget News via iMore - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch blog http://www.imore.com/ April 28, 2017 at 01:02AM
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