Social Media Quick Tip #1
Get in the habit of using hashtags
When you think of hashtags what's the first thing that pops into your mind? If you said Twitter than you are with the majority.
Hashtags Work in Other Social Media Outlets
Pinterest will turn any hashtags that you include in your descriptions into clickable links. These links will search on those hashtags should someone click on them. You'll see them appear in Facebook as well. Some people find them annoying and when you see posts or pages flooded with them I completely agree that is not attractive and makes me head for the exits.
The Better Way to Use Hashtags
Incorporate Hashtags Into the Sentences or Paragraphs
The better ways to approach hashtags is to make them part of the sentence. Let me show you what I mean by this. Suppose you are posting something about dog training. Then you could write a post like:
For more tips about #dogtraining, see my website that has the #best and #easiest tips to make your pooch do what you want.
As you can see, this looks much more natural and readable. Now as to whether you use #dogtraining or #dog #training is really a personal choice but remember that training will be triggered for other niches as well.
Use Them Sparingly
Don't just blast a bunch of them at the end of your posts in hopes that it will get people to those posts. It may but it can also give people an indication that your only objective when doing that is to boost your viewing and that can be a turnoff for a lot of people.
Make Them Relevant
There's nothing worse than doing a search on one topic and totally non related items appear in your results. This can often be caused by hashtags that were not categorized correctly. People do this so that they can get more traffic to their post but what good is traffic that is not targeted?
This also has ramifications in advertising as well. Facebook allows advertisers to hyper target the people that will see their ads. You can choose based on age, gender, interests, etc. It's a great way to get your message to the right people. But it also allows you to target based on hashtags. So if the hashtags are not relevant it skews the results for the advertiser. This is something to think about if you decide to advertise. Be careful when including hashtags in your targeting.
What About Places That Don't Support Them?
It may seem a bit out of place to include hashtags on social channels that don't support them but quite honestly I think we have gotten so used to them at this point that no one would mind seeing them. Of course, it all goes back to using them correctly.
More on Excessive Use of Hashtags
Immediately after I completed this article, I stumbled upon an article on Mashable that explains about excessive use of hashtags.So this is actually an update to my initial publishing.
They mention Instagram but it is equally applicable anywhere. It's an interesting read and supports the point I was trying to make about using hashtags sparingly.
Here is the link:
An Argument For Using Liberal Amounts of Hashtags
Of course, there are people that don't have a problem with using hashtags in posts to their hearts content. As you can see from this article by Chris Ayers, he claims that using hashtags has increased his Instagram followers by a factor of 8. You can read the post here:
http://www.postplanner.com/popular-instagram-hashtags-for-getting-new-followers
But my feeling on this is just because something works doesn't necessarily mean it's right. This is tough because we all want to increase our social connectivity and if something is found to work, people will likely exploit it. Black hat techniques worked until such a time as Google and everyone else figured out a way to stop it.
The bottom line is to go ahead and use hashtags but use them in an appropriate manner. As to which side of the fence you are on with respect to excessive use or not, that's up to you. My vote is no.
