The hashtag! We've all seen them on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook (although they are next to useless on Facebook, but that's another story), but there is much more to using one of these than most people realise and having just witnessed the perfect misuse of one, I thought it was about time I wrote a blog post to share my hashtag tips, dos and don'ts.
The way I see it, there are three main uses of hashtags. I'm going to deal with the easiest two first as most people get these right. Firstly, jumping into conversations and getting your post seen. This is the main use on Instagram and to an extent on Twitter. If you tag your photograph #CatsOfInstagram you are trying to get your picture seen by people looking for pictures of cats, and if you search #CatsOfInstagram you know you're going to see lots of pictures of cats. The world has got the hang of that one.
Secondly, we have the comedy hashtag; using a hashtag for comedy effect, usually in a tweet, that you don't actually expect someone to click on and find a whole conversation around it. When I used the hashtag #TakeAnInanimateObjectForAWalk the other day on Twitter, I didn't actually expect anyone to click on it and find a whole movement around taking tea trolleys on public transport (which is also another story). Regardless of whether they are funny or not, most people mess around with hashtags in this way and that's fine.
Then we come onto the most difficult hashtag, the event or gathering hashtag. Something is happening (be it a one off event, a course that runs for a year or a group that meets every week), you're tweeting about, you're sharing pictures on Instagram, you want other people to do the same, and you want people to be able to see all of these posts and find out what's going on. You need a hashtag, but most importantly you need a unique hashtag...unless you're an organisation who attracts the volume of posts that something like the BBC does - they could probably pick any hashtag they wanted and make it their own! I'll prove to you what I mean about the importance of unique hashtags. I just saw a tweet about participants in #WhateverTheHashtagWas. The hashtag was four letters, I assume initials, and I didn't know what they stood for so I clicked on it to find out more. What appeared was a mix of football and I think medical tweets, and one person announcing they were off to the pool! None of these seemed related to the tweet I'd been reading. The result, I'm none the wiser about what was being participated in, have forgotten what the letters were, and have lost interest in the tweet and am now writing this blog post about hashtags instead! Probably not the desired outcome. The moral of this story, do a few Twitter searches before you claim a hashtag as your own to see how unique it is, choose something that isn't going to attract lots of unrelated noise, and encourage everyone involved to use that hashtag (people using the wrong hashtags just directs people to the wrong places where they might not see the information you want them to see or they might be saying amazing things about you and you'll never know!). Get it right and this use of a hashtag can be a brilliant thing, get it wrong and you lose the attention of people who might want to get involved.
#BeAHashtagNinja
PS This is called Be a Hashtag Ninja because I used it for comedy effect at the bottom of the post, then did a quick Twitter search for it and realised it's unique, so am claiming it for sharing this post and will see what happens (probably nothing!)
