What Are Hashtags For?

What are Hashtags?

Do you know what this # means? For 20 plus years of existence I have known this as a number sign but as our society and technology progress it has evolved into a new lingo known as a Hashtag. What is a Hashtag? This is (#) the symbol of a Hashtag, it is usually followed by a word or a phrase that contains one’s thought. These Hashtagged short messages are usually found in microblogging social media sites such as Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Google plus and even Facebook. These Hashtags act as keyword tool that groups certain messages together.
It is a way to group a topic so it’ll be easier to view the subject and its related hashtags. For example #food, once you click on the #food hashtag, a list of results for #food will appear. And if that Hashtag is promoted by a number of people, it can trend and attract more people to discuss the subject using a Hashtag. This is also a good marketing tool; it can be used to promote a new episode of a television series or an entertainment show.

Despite its popularity there are things that we should still remember when using a Hashtag.

Things to consider

1. Avoid putting too many Hashtags.

 It is quiet annoying when people put a lot of Hashtags for one photo. If you have 10 or more Hashtags, it is advisable to just create a sentence description for it.

2. Make sure you can read it right when it is Hashtagged.

One of the biggest Hashtag fail that I saw was #susanalbumparty. For me it read as Sus Anal Bum Party, it was such a big hashtag fail that Susan Boyle’s team immediately changed it to #SusanBoylesAlbumParty which was way better. So if you are going to create a Hashtag that you hope will "trend" just be sure to read and re-read it.

3. Don’t put Hashtags on Facebook, for now.

A lot of people don’t know that Hashtags doesn’t work for Facebook. However, Facebook is looking into integrating # to their system. So for now, let us veer away from that.