Hello? Is this thing on?
So, you’ve created your new social media account and you’re ready to share all of your great ideas with the world. Have you tried it? Does it seem a lot like shouting into the void? Is anyone out there listening, or is everyone just talking? Of course, your first tweet or post doesn’t somehow magically appear on screens all over the world to people who eagerly want to hear from you but didn’t know it until your post. Social networks just don’t work that way. Indeed, a social network in which every message is given top priority for display to all users would be complete chaos; the the posts would fly by at an incomprehensible speed as each new message displaces the last one. For a large network to communicate without it all breaking down into babble there needs to be ways for people to self-identify which messages they are interested in receiving.
The most obvious mechanism for this sort of self-selection is the “follow”. If you are interested in the things a person or organization has to say, you can become a follower, and by doing so you’ll be sent all of the messages from that person or organization. For example, on Twitter I am a follower of @HumanePA, which posts about animal welfare topics in Pennsylvania, as well as @inglorioustrek, a podcast about the minutia of Star Trek. If you want to hear about the activities of my company, you can follow @AirdrieMedia so that you do not miss any of my updates.
Shortcomings of the follower model
Relying on the social “follow” isn’t a perfect strategy, however. For most users, there are two serious limitations.
The first major limitation you will encounter has to do with your followers. As in: you don’t have any. If you’re like most people, you start your social media life with a handful of followers — your close friends or a few business contacts, probably. Basically, these are people you’re already in touch with and could just as easily call or email. Your first handful of followers are not the ones you are trying to reach with this fantastic new communications medium, they’re the people you can already reach with the old ones. If you are a celebrity or a politician, you can probably gain followers very quickly through your in-real-life notoriety, but absent that, you have a classic chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to attracting followers, and that is: even if your tweets/posts are interesting enough that people would want to follow you, you still need to get your message in front of them in the first place.
The other major problem with the follower model has to do with the volume of tweets users have to contend with. Early in my Twitter life, I followed a Philadelphia Eagles player named @LeonardWeaver, who was a great player to watch on the field and, as far as I can tell, a generally positive and upbeat personality. After a few days I just had to unfollow him because, frankly, this guy didn’t have a thought that he wasn’t ready to share with his fans. Thought about the upcoming season? Tweet. Opinion on the new Giants linebacker? Tweet. What’s for breakfast? Tweet. What’s for after breakfast? Tweet. Reading about his food choices and his dogs were, I have to admit, mildly entertaining but it became very difficult to find the truly useful information among all of the random thoughts.
I, myself, blog on various unrelated topics. You might want to follow me to hear about Peloton or Zwift, but if you do so be prepared for a lot of photos of rescue dogs, because that’s what I post about most often. (Of course, I’m speaking of my personal blog here. On my business social media accounts I try to stick strictly to business and avoid any off-topic postings, but most people aren’t going to want to manage multiple social accounts.) In a lot of cases you’d probably rather follow just certain topics or conversations, rather than following specific speakers. That way, you would increase your chances of seeing content that is aligned with your interests and pass up unrelated messages from the same sources.
If only there was a way to connect a tweet (or other social media post) to a larger conversation? A way to, say, tag a message as belonging to a particular group?
Enter the #hashtag
Hashtags are both easy to use and critical for effective communication in social media. Without them, social posts are just free-floating thoughts in the ether, but with them posts on a particular topic are knitted together in a (relatively) coherent group. If you don’t know a hashtag from a hash brown, here’s a quick primer:
A hashtag is a single word or phrase (with the spaces removed) preceded by “#” (which is called the “hash sign”). When you “tag” a social media post (which is just a cool way of saying you add one or more hashtags to your message) you are connecting that post with all the others that use the same hashtag. The hashtags can be anywhere in the post, but they are often added at the end. The only real rule is that hashtags must be one word (and it’s OK to just remove spaces to turn a short phrase into a single “word”).
From the technology perspective, there’s nothing magical about hashtags. The only significant feature of hashtags is that they’re unique. But because they’re unique it’s possible to search Twitter, Instagram, or other social media platforms for the hashtag and see all the related posts (typically in newest-to-oldest order). There are even ways of searching for hashtags across different platforms. A post can (and often does) have more than one hashtag if it belongs in more than one relevant conversation.
Using hashtags to follow topics
As a consumer of social media, you can use hashtags to follow along or join in conversations (called “threads”). You do this by searching for specific hashtags or adding those hashtags to your own posts. For example, if you are interested in electric vehicles, you could search for the term #ElectricVehicle (ie: https://twitter.com/hashtag/ElectricVehicle). This will give you a broader list of sources than following electric vehicle manufacturers and may surface some topics that those companies would rather not discuss. You could even add your own thoughts on the topic by including the hashtag in your own posts. Knowing the hashtags that are in use for a particular topic will enable you to join the conversation.
Using hashtags to start a conversation
You don’t even need to rely on existing hashtags… you can create your own, too! An animal shelter I volunteer at has an annual bike ride, and they use the hashtag #Handlebarks to promote it. They use it themselves to promote the event, event sponsors use the hashtag to promote their connection to the event, and participants also use the hashtag to tell their friends and followers about it (and, by doing so, connect them to the event and hopefully recruit new participants).
A non-profit I work with is called “FLITE”, and uses #FLITE4kids as a hashtag on all of their communication. This way, people who see a post and who are interested in learning more can follow-up on the hashtag and learn the background of the group’s activities. It so happens that once a year FLITE sponsors a fundraising basketball challenge against the Harlem Wizards, and uses the hashtag #FLITEvsWizards in addition to #FLITE4kids to promote that event specifically. (Example: “The Harlem Wizards are coming to town March 18th to challenge our fearless T/E School District home team. Tickets on sale now! #FLITEvsWizards #FLITE4kids”)
As I mentioned above, a hashtag can be virtually anything (as long as it’s one word). Before you begin to use a hashtag to start a conversation, it would be good to do a quick search for that hashtag to make sure it’s not already in use in a way that can cause confusion or perhaps damage your brand (it would be unfortunate if you found out that the hashtag you just printed on all of your new posters is the same one being used as a rallying cry by hate groups, or something of the sort.)
So, which hashtags do I use?
If you’ve read this far, you probably recognize that selecting the right hashtags to get your message in front of the people you want to connect to is, in fact, the secret sauce of social media. And how do you actually find the hashtags? That’s the million-dollar question.
The easiest and lowest-cost option (and sometimes the best option) is to just take note of the hashtags that are already in use in existing conversations. For example, to learn about cultural events in Philadelphia I picked @PhilaMuseum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and read their social feed. Within the first few posts I learned about an antique show called #ThePhiladelphiaShow. Similarly, if I know someone who is engaged in a particular social cause, I can look to their feed to see what hashtags they are using, and use this to enter (or at least listen in on) those conversations.
Beyond this, there are Internet resources to tell you which hashtags are becoming more prevalent (colloquially known as “trending”), and which hashtags have close relationships, which is useful if you know one hashtag but are looking for a better one. For example, on Instagram the hashtag #dogstagram has 120,000 posts, but the hashtag #dogsofinstagram has over twice that many. There are many, many resources for this and some, such as the trending tab on Twitter are free. Others promise to do a better job but are only available by subscription. And as with search engine optimization (in which finding and targeting keywords is the name of the game), you can hire someone to do this hashtag research for you and to make recommendations on what to use. (Insert link to contact form here!)
Join the conversation!
Finding and using the right hashtags makes the difference between virtually talking to yourself and engaging with the larger community of social media users. When reading social posts, take the extra couple of seconds to read the hashtags being used and get familiar with them. A good, basic understanding of hashtags and how to use them will greatly broaden your reach in social media.