ALONG COMES MARY

Happy Monday, friends! I thought it was time for another installment in the #SocialMediaMonday series. This week? I am going to attempt to shed some light on one of the big beasts in social media: Hashtags.

A few years back, no body knew what the heck a hashtag was. Then, all of a sudden, every post on Twitter and Instagram had that ubiquitous numbers symbol before a word (#LikeThis). Love them or hate ’em, they’re a MUST in your social media shares if you want to get your content to a larger audience within your relevant reach. Example, if you are posting pictures on Instagram of your maltipoo and want to meet other maltipoo lovers, you would go tag:  #Maltipoo #PoodlesOfInstagram #MaltipooLove. Get it?

While articles like this show a decrease in hashtags during such huge events like yesterday’s Super Bowl, I continue to find them a must for my posts as well as for clients. I also utilize them in all my projects when searching for quality content that fits into my clients needs. With Athena Tile and Stone, I often take to Twitter and search #LosAngeles,  #Tiles and #HomeImprovement  to find fun tweets to retweet onto Athena’s Twitter page.

HASHTAG, TWEET, REPEAT

First thing in order to utilize hashtags? Create a Twitter account. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, business, blogger, all of the above, I love Twitter and everything I have learned since launching mine for the blog. I had joined in 2009, never used it, then began to use it daily once Along Comes Mary was born almost 4 years ago. Its taken time, but, as long as you’re using and following hashtags of interest, it’s a great tool.

How does one even hashtag on Twitter? Easy peasy. Heres an example below:

As you can see, this is a tweet to promote my Price is Right post. #GameShows is relevant to the article, while #dreams is a popular, fun tag that will get a wide audience and #FunDay is a take off for Monday, a common play on words tag for today, or there’s always #SundayFunDay. My rule of thumb? Keep the tweet tagging to 3 or else you look very spammy.

Some are masters at using hashtags in their sentence, you could say: “#winetasting on this beautiful #Saturday in #Hollywood.” Again, these 3 tags are perfect as they’re utilizing your activity so others with that interest see your post, the day is widely used so you will get an array of folks using the tag and something like your city can not only show people where you’re at, but, perhaps they’re looking for things to do where you are, too.

UP TO 30 HASHTAGS WELCOME ON INSTAGRAM

Yep, that is true. Instagram, the widely popular app that lets you snap a picture, select an artsy filter then share your masterpiece with the world, will allow up to 30 tags to describe your picture. Does this mean you should use 30 tags? Not really. Again, the spam factor will be there. While I admit to going a little cray cray with the Instagram tagging, here is an example of a recent gram I posted with several tags:

You will also notice, I made the first comment with 3 more tags. Why? This is a common trick of the trade for Instagram lovers. Some might do that simply because they thought of another good tag, or, they’re attempting to look less junky. You can see I was all about travel tags with the above picture, and I also rarely don’t include #bloggerslife as, well, I post a lot while on assignment for this blog.

Another great tool on Instagram is they now help you along with a drop down of words as you type out your tag. This will show you how many posts there are with the keyword #Travel or perhaps help you as you might discover #TravelGram is more used than just one word.

SHOULD I BOTHER TO TAG ON FACEBOOK?

You can, it cannot hurt, but, the reach is not as massive as you will find on Twitter or Instagram. Keep them to a MAXIMUM of 3 tags on your Facebook posts, though, and don’t feel too bad if it doesn’t bring in the likes as much as you would have hoped.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hashtags. I hope these tips have helped explain a bit about tags.  I’m always here if you’d like to chat further about social media & what I can do to further your business! Email at [email protected] 🙂