I am going to embarrass myself here, but I am a firm believer in honesty so here goes. There was once a time when I believed hashtags (#, followed by a word) were the most annoying thing on social media. I thought it was overkill, like people had to explain what their post was about because maybe they’re that worried about other people missing the point? It just seemed so strange to me.
Well it didn’t end so I decided to check out exactly what these hash tags were doing. If my memory serves me correctly, it was #funny that I first checked out on Facebook. There was some #funny stuff in the compiled posts that people hashtagged as funny. Funny was enough to change my mindset. I just witnessed that hashtags are really good for keeping shared information organized.
There are more than two dozen sites that recognize hash tags, and they’re all pretty relevant. Here are some heavy hitters: FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, Flickr, Kickstarter, Vine and YouTube. There is a hashtag for just about anything you can think of, and if you think of something that you can’t find a hashtag for, just create it yourself, anyone can do it! Celebrities, social issues, countries, cities, towns, feelings, and of course businesses all have and use hashtags! It only makes sense to cash in on something that everyone is doing!
Hashtags for businesses keep you talking about relevant things, and people who have in interest in what you’re talking about can find you even if they didn’t know you existed until that one special hashtag. 1 Did you know that AMEX gives discounts on certain purchases when you hashtag a specific code on twitter? All you have to do is link your account, and boom your tweeting money back into your own pocket. Now that’s #smart!
Do you use Hashtags? Let me know if you think they’re important, or annoying!