UNDERSTANDING HASHTAGS

I have always used the analogy that a hashtag is essentially a filing system. They generally work the same way on all platforms in that they group posts/content together. That said, many people still misunderstand how to use hashtags to their benefit.

In the post I want to demystify the concept of a hashtags and explain to you how to use them so that you get your content to where it needs to be.

Lets’ put Hashtags into two categories, that being general and specific.

Specific Hashtags

These are the hashtags that most people use, and these are the hashtags that you probably understand the most. These are specific to your brand or your song or even your competition.

For example, #findmusic would be specific for me. Another example would be if Toyota decided to run a competition to win a car, they might develop a specific hashtag for that competition so they could follow entries such as #winatoyota2022 or #toyotacarcomp22. This means that everyone would use that to enter and when they search that hashtag, they would find all the entries to the competition.

I’m sure you get the idea now about specific hashtags, now lets more on to the more important ones.

General Hashtags

General Hashtags are super important as they might extend the reach of your content. Ideally you want to put your content in the correct “file” so that you can target people who will be interested in that content and that will engage with your content.

Imagine you had 3 draws in your kitchen and in each draw, you kept a group of items, such as cutlery in one draw, then spices in the next and sauces in the last. You would know that if you want Salt and Pepper you would go to the #spice draw. If you wanted a Knife and fork, you would go to #cutlery draw.

This is the same way that general hashtags work, they group your content with other content like yours so that people who are interested in that content can find it easily. 

USING HASHTAGS

On most platforms, if not all, you need only use 3 to 5 hashtags to get your content Search Engine Optimization (SEO) correct. You will notice on YouTube videos that only the first 3 hashtags display when they are put in a description of a video. So I suggest that you try use 1 or 2 specific hashtags and 2 to 3 general hashtags for each post.

For example, if I upload a video of my new song to YouTube I would use 1 specific tag and 2 general tags such as a hashtag of my artist name, then the track genre and lastly the video type. (#findmusic #housemusic #officialvideo)

As a side note, hashtags are not the same as “Tags” in YouTube, go research tags, they are important.