Creating Useful Hashtags

Categories: Information Instruction

Anyone who has been on Facebook or Twitter lately has seen posts that consist of a few words followed by fifteen hashtags. I don’t know about you, but those posts drive me crazy. “Why?”, you may ask. When I see a post with many hashtags, it simply overwhelms me. While those hashtags may contain useful information for me, I choose to move on because I do not feel like taking 20 minutes to click on each and every hashtag. So, how can the authors prevent this from happening? By using hashtags correctly. To do this, we first need to know what exactly hashtags are.

So what exactly is a hashtag?  A hashtag is a way to categorize messages by a specific keyword or set of keywords. It groups all tweets, posts, or blogs together that have been marked with the same hashtag. When you click on that hashtag, it opens a new page showing all of the messages or posts containing the same hashtag. This is useful when you are sharing information about a very specific topic. Using hashtags allows people to see all messages about a specific topic and in doing so they can see your information and link back to your account. So now that we know what a hashtag is, how do we use them correctly?

There are a lot of different uses for hashtags from personal messages to business information and from political campaigns to simple themes like “I hate Mondays.” There is no one specific way that you can use hashtags correctly because of the variety of ways you can use them. However there are some basic rules of thumb that you can use that will draw people to the hashtag rather than pushing them away to the next post.

1. Do not use more than two hashtags on any one post. When you use more hashtags than the words of the post, you are guaranteed to have a lot of eye rolling and people ignoring your post.
2. Use relevant hashtags. When you use random hashtags, there is little to no chance that there are other people using that hashtag. If you are the only person using a hashtag, there is little reason for other people to visit it unless you have many relevant posts with the same hashtag.
3. Check hashtags before you use them. You do not have any control on how or which specific people use the same hashtag that you may be using. The hashtag in your post may be for something very innocent, however others may be using that same hashtag for other purposes.
4. Do not make up your own silly hashtags. Since hashtags are made to group similar posts together, it does not make sense to create a hashtag and only use it once. If there is only one post with the hashtag, when people click on it they will be sent to a new page with just that one post.
5. Use hashtags as a way to link your relevant messages together. If your message, post, or blog contains information for an event or business, check to see if there is a hashtag that is being used. If there is, use it. When you use hashtags correctly it should lead people to more relevant information.

If you follow these rules of thumb, your followers will be much happier and your hashtags will be more useful. Hashtags can be extremely useful and are needed to pull posts from multiple people in to one easy to find place. Using them correctly will not only get your own message out, but also pull people back from those hashtag categories back to your Twitter, Facebook, or blog account.

Sites – https://support.twitter.com/articles/49309-using-hashtags-on-twitter