Hashtags first appeared on Twitter in August 2007. A hashtag is nothing more than a word or a concept written in text and preceded by the hash symbol #. And all this is inspired by the old (yet not obsolete) IRC protocol.
A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, but the boom in social networks has made us get used to hashtags, what they are, and how they work. There is no event that does not have its own hashtag that all participants include within their messages on social networks.
We use them many times unconsciously because everybody does the same, but hashtags are more important than you can imagine. And you should use them in the right way to get more out of promoting your content on social networks.
Why Use Hashtags on Social Networks?
Here the easy thing would be to say that you have to use them because practically everyone uses them. But we must go further and understand why it is worth including hashtags in the messages we publish on social networks. I will explain a couple of reasons below.
Hashtags Make Your Content Easier to Find
When you write content in WordPress, you have the possibility to tag it with categories and tags. You do this so that the content is indexed on your page in a consistent way. Thus, it is possible to navigate through these categories and tags to related content that the visitor may be interested in consulting.
The same thing happens on social networks. But instead of categories and tags, we have hashtags. Any user of a social network who performs a search may receive our messages as a result of the query if such messages are properly tagged with the right hashtag.
The life span of a social publication is getting shorter every day, because the number of messages on social networks continues to increase on a daily basis. So adding hashtags to tag our content can help you share your message with a broader audience.
Nelio Content
I’m so happy about Nelio Content that I will sound like a payed advocate… but here’s why you’ll love it: it works as promised, its auto-scheduling feature is top-notch, Nelio’s value for money is unmatched, and the support team feels like your own.
Panozk
Hashtags Gain Social Interactions
Tagging your social media messages with a list of hashtags that make sense with regards to the WordPress post linked in the image can make other users see your post. Then, the chances of other users interacting with your publication increase.
There are other accounts that are dedicated to monitoring certain hashtags and following accounts that publish content with those hashtags, liking the publications, or even republishing them by referring the original author and thus increasing the chances that your audience increases.
It is clear that you can find a territory full of bots that are responsible for doing this work and will give you a false sense of growth. Avoid them by tagging messages with hashtags that make sense, not ones that will only provide you with fake interactions. It is hard work, but step by step, if you use the correct hashtags, your shared messages will get more interactions.
How to Find The Best Hashtags For Instagram?
If there is a social network in which hashtags are paramount, it is certainly Instagram. Even though it started as a mere app to share your photo reel, hashtags have always been one of the most popular aspects of Instagram.
Depending on the specific hashtag that you use in the description of your images on Instagram, the impact that these can have is going to be very different. There are hashtags with much more audience than others, and to know the impact of each hashtag, it is best to make use of one of the many websites that are in charge of giving you a list with the top hashtags of a specific topic.
One of the best-known websites to get the most relevant hashtags on Instagram is All Hashtag. You can search for the keyword you want and this website will recommend the best hashtags to use in your messages.
You can even see the different rankings they have. It is worth to highlight the lists of hashtags that you can use in your publications to get more followers or more likes in your publications.
On the other hand, you also have the option of using TagBlender, another website of the same style in which you are the one that is selecting the hashtags that you want to use from among the different lists of most popular hashtags.
And these two are not the only ones. I encourage you to try them and if you find a better option, tell us about it.
How to Automatically Post Messages on Social Networks With Hashtags
Nelio Content, our editorial calendar and content promotion plugin, allows you to automatically publish messages on social media.
This does not mean that it only publishes them at the time you decide, but it creates them automatically both by extracting relevant sentences from your content and by using social templates that you can customize from the settings of the plugin itself:
Nelio Content’s social templates let you define messages using the text you want or certain placeholders such as {title}, which is replaced in the final message by the title of the content that is shared in the message (usually a post), or {permalink}, which is replaced by the link to the content.
What you may not know is that you can also use the {tags} placeholder. When you use it in a social template, as you can see in the screenshot above, once that template is used to create a message automatically, it will replace {tags} with the tags you have used in the WordPress post you share in the message.
For example, as we see in the previous screenshot, we have a template for Twitter with the following content: {title} {tags} {permalink}. If the message we create from this template shares this post by Ruth, the final content of the message that will appear on Twitter would be the following:
Create price tables with Gutenberg #Gutenberg #Plugins #Resources #Tutorials https://neliosoftware.com/blog/creating-pricing-tables-with-the-gutenberg-block-editor/
As you can see, we replace {tags} with the tags of the post formatted as a list of hashtags. Following this approach, we can have social messages with hashtags on any social network with practically no effort. Once you defined the social templates you want with {tags}, everything works automatically.
I recommend you to use hashtags on your social media messages. And remember, you can comment down below your opinion about hashtags.
Featured image by Jan Baborák on Unsplash.
Leave a Reply