#tags are useful things – they boost the findability of online content and facilitate the creation of virtual communities around events or activities.
Hashtags inserted within posts on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram are live – click on one and it will reveal other public posts that share that same hashtag. Inserting aligned hashtags in your own posts will help others discover your content as people search on themed hashtags.
Hashtags enable people who are participating in a shared experience to discover each other and each other’s related social content. Conferences, festivals, television programs, cultural and sporting events are commonly assigned one or more hashtags. This can happen organically or by design by the organisers – either way, they act as a social binding agent for the occasion.
Hashtags are also commonly used in online competitions, enabling organisers to find the social content entrants have tagged as part of an entry requirement, or to judge content they have generated.
And finally, hashtags can be used as a form of expression – not to make a post more findable. Someone for example might tweet in anticipation of an upcoming concert using the hashtag #cantwait.
Hashtags commonly fall into 1 of 5 categories:
General theme – what people would generally and logically use to theme their content, e.g #socialmedia #icecream, #trains, #quotes, #autism, #foodporn
Place – associated to physical places, e.g. #melbourne, #smithst #melbmuseum #parismetro
Event or activity – associated with live events such as conferences festivals, sporting fixtures, television programs, tweet-ups, etc. Organisers of these events and activities will often proactively promote the hashtag they want their audiences to adopt (even if this doesn’t happen, the audience will often make one up and adopt it quickly). Some tags persist across multiple instances of an activity such as a TV show, or they might be one-offs – see below.
Disposable, one-offs – used just once such as at a conference, e.g. #dentalconf13
Brand – promoted by organisations, groups or teams to help people find all related branded content, as well as to encourage others to adopt the tag when referencing the organisation, e.g. #net101 #melbvixons #pwc
Here are some of the do’s and don’ts of using hashtags:
- They are not case sensitive. If a hashtag incorporates more than one word, some people like to use upper and lower case characters to make the words stand out, e.g. #SydneyRoads
- You can’t have spaces or include punctuation (except for an underscore) – each tag must be all one word such as #ausvotes – NOT ‘#aus votes’ or ‘#aus-votes’ or ‘#ausvotes!’
- You can use as many hashtags as you like in a post but more than 4 starts to look crowded or spammy – the exception is Instagram where up to 20 hashtags associated with a post is common.
- Before announcing a hashtag to an audience make sure it’s not already in popular use by group of people somewhere else in the world.
- No-one owns a hashtag – they’re public fare. You can try and keep a hashtag a secret, but there’s no stopping outsiders using your hashtag once it becomes known.
If you want to search a specific hashtag across multiple social platforms, try Tagboard
Image by “CAVE CANEM”