When I post something on any social media platform, I have this strange habit to put hashtag in the caption, irrespective of its usability. I use #hashtags in WhatsApp status, in conversations and at many other places where it has no functional use. But according to me, it's a smart way to put your thought in minimal words so people understand your thought with minimal words. Several people have this habit to add hashtags in each description. Often they use hashtags unnecessarily on every media platform. In this digital era, the hashtag plays an impactful role over popular social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Google Plus, Tumblr, and Flickr.
Studying and experimenting with hashtags is a crucial and continuous process in social media strategy. Companies carry out research on the trends, popular hashtags, and analyse the statistics of hashtags to achieve maximum success in social media marketing.
So let's understand hashtags, its history, and its usage.
What is a Hashtag?
It is a flag or a label attached to a word or group of words which helps a user identify and find information about the same.
The symbol # is known as the number sign, hash or pound sign. It has been stated that the # symbol originally evolved from the Roman symbol ℔ which means pound weight. # is also known as the pound key. Bell’s Don McPherson referred to # as an octothorpe on the touch-tone phones.
When did it appear for the very first time on the World Wide Web?
In 1988, it had been used by IRC (Internet Relay Channel). IRC is a network where people could communicate to one another through channels which have been denoted by a # sign. After achieving successful growth of their community list (almost half a million users), IRC renamed this sign as "hashtag".
#FIRST #HASHTAG on social media
Chris Messina posted the first hashtag "#barcamp" in August 2007 on his Twitter account. The tweet was:
?how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]??
Evan Williams, Twitter founder, wasn't sure about the usability of a hashtag. Messina stated that IRC influenced this pioneering concept. Messina started posting whispering tweets with the idea of creating an inner circle on the website. The concept of hashtag got popular over the period of 2008 and 2009. People began to adore hashtags and started using it frequently. #askobama was the key hashtag of President Barak Obama's campaign of 2018.
After getting success on Twitter, the hashtag got adopted by other social media platforms like Youtube, Instagram, Google Plus, Tumblr, and Flickr.
Characteristics of the Hashtag
The hashtag is a simple search tool, easy to use, up to the hash(point). It gives you relevant results of the query. It is an evolved concept so you can use it on multi-platforms.
It could be used for multiple objectives like current affairs, digital publication, announcement, media, news, special offers, event information, trends, queries, retweets, congratulatory posts, personal thoughts, achievements, inventions and discoveries, amongst many other objectives.
Guidelines for Hashtags on Twitter:
• Do not add spaces or punctuation in a hashtag, or it will not work properly.
• If you tweet with a hashtag on a public account, anyone who searches for that hashtag may find your tweet.
• Twitter recommends using no more than 2 hashtags per tweet as a best practice, but you may use as many hashtags in a tweet as you like.
• Type a hashtagged keyword in the search bar to discover content and accounts based on your interests.
• Hashtagged words that become very popular are often trending topics.
Guidelines for hashtags on Instagram:
• You can create a post with a caption and a few relevant hashtags (up to 30)
• You can use #hashtags on Instagram stories, in your bios, and in your posts.
• Understanding types of tags and their corresponding audience is a key feature of social media strategy.
• Broadly, there are three categories of hashtags:
• Branded hashtags (relates to your business - company name, tagline, product(s) name, campaign name),
• community hashtags (they might not directly connect to the business),
• campaign hashtags (they are small term hashtags, tied to a specific concept)
• Take the privilege of saved captions to keep hashtags organized.
• The top posts for a hashtag is a way to get discovered by new users.
• Hide some hashtags to keep your reader focused.
• Use emojis in hashtags. It plays important role in getting more searched.
The hashtag is only one aspect of social media strategy . . It's important to keep yourself updated with the other evolving functionalities and features of social media.
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