Hashtags are marketed and promoted actively across all platforms of media. No matter where you set eyes on, you will find a hashtag being used for one purpose or the other. Even on news channels, you will find hashtags being generated for every breaking news story around and those hashtags are used by viewers to put up their opinions on the matter. What this trend of using hashtags proves beyond doubt is that digital marketers cannot ignore them anymore.
What’s more, thanks to the popularity of the hashtags, they are not limited to Twitter alone. Almost all the social media channels, including Facebook and Instagram, are using hashtags. This makes the case stronger for internet marketers to leverage more value out of their hashtags. With the smart and judicious use of hashtags, they can organize social media chatter about their brand and even drum up more noise on those particular hashtags.
In this post, we will individually look at different social media platforms and how you can use hashtags in those channels.
This microblogging site is the mother of the hashtag phenomenon. To help users tweeting on a single topic, hashtags were first used to bring them all under a single umbrella. This helped users in taking the discussion and chatter forward. These days, the popularity of hashtags has spilled it over to other social channels as well. On Twitter, the hashtag can be as long and short as you want, provided your entire tweet stays within 140 characters. The key to use Twitter hashtags for branding is to ensure that you promote it actively and encourage followers to participate in discussions with these hashtags. If you feel that your hashtags are not grabbing enough eyeballs, you can try out event hashtags because they are always popular. Like #Christmas or #NewYear.
Definitely the most popular among the social networking channels, the use of hashtags on Facebook is a bit of a mixed bag. On the positive side is the fact that you can use as many hashtags for a particular post as you want. On the negative side, the technology on Facebook in utilizing hashtags is a confusing proposition. For example, if you conduct a search based on a hashtag, you will end up with a Facebook page on that particular topic! It is must easier to use the hashtag in the form of a URL, like facebook.com/hashtag/corals to look for #corals. However, with the popularity of Instagram hashtags picking up a storm, Facebook is fine-tuning its own backyard.
The rule here is that you cannot use any special symbols in the hashtag except the underscore (_). You can, of course, use numbers here. In fact, while posting a single photo, you can use 30 hashtags at max! If you have already posted the photo, you can publish the hashtags in the Comments section. The key to effectively use Instagram hashtags is to find out the trending ones and using them according to relevance. For brands looking at Instragram hashtags to reach out to newer audiences, take the path of hashtag games. They are always useful, just like using location-based hashtags. Location names can be in full, like #NewYork or an abbreviation like #NY.
Google Plus
Another biggie in the pond, Google Plus does not allow for spaces in the hashtag, just like everyone else. You can use any kind of character, except that there will be no linking to the hashtag if you do not use only numbers, letters and the ubiquitous underscore. So, you are better off using these only! There is a difference between how Google Plus looks at hashtags as opposed to the other social media channels on this list. It is not about assimilating all the hashtag posts in one banner alone. Google Plus tries to make way for more searches by users. In fact, research has shown that descriptive hashtags work better on Google Plus than event or even location-based ones.
The Final Word
As evident, each social media network comes with its own share of positives and requisites. The idea is to tune your hashtag accordingly. Since the hashtag is definitely here to stay, you will do well to embrace it in all its diverse avatars.
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