Are #Hashtags Out of Date?

The short answer is no. But I would like to elaborate as this is a trending question that I am constantly being asked. I believe this question has been raised because of the people that seem to abuse hashtags and use 20+ on every post, with tags that aren’t even relevant to their photo, which is ruining the user experience of hashtags all together. 

Hashtags are really important for finding a theme that is trending or creating a way of following your content or allowing users who are primarily on Instagram to follow your content. Hashtags could be used obviously on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook but where we see the most prolific use of them and the best use of them is on Instagram.

I think we all have that one friend that seems to turn every sentence into a hashtag and it annoys the heck out of everyone because it’s not a thing and it’s never going to be a thing. Try not to overuse hashtags, but rather, use a handful of hashtags that are most relevant to you and your business, or product. Some people will put 50+ hashtags at the bottom of every post. Instagram is owned by Facebook now and will actually penalise accounts for doing this because they are trying to improved customer experience when using their social media platforms. So, try and keep it to around five or six of the most relevant hashtags that are relevant to that piece of content.

Then what you want to do when using hashtags is do a little bit of research and actually see what sort of words or what sort of pieces of content are trending when you do a search for that particular hashtag.

So, let’s just say you search for the hashtag #digitalmarketing, something that I use fairly regularly because that’s what I do. If you look that up, you’ll see a lot of content around the digital marketing space. This is a great way to see the type of content that comes up when you use that particular hashtag, and based on this information you can then decide if that particular tag is relevant to your post. I highly recommend you spend time researching hashtags because more often than not, when you search a particular hashtag there could be things that come up that are not particularly pleasant or may be inappropriate, so you wouldn’t want to associate your brand or image with that inappropriate hashtag.

So remember, hashtags are still a great tool for building a theme around your business and can be used to build an authentic online following. Do your research and hopefully you’ll have a lot more fun using hashtags and using them properly with all your social media and your content from here on in.

 

I hope that helps!

Thanks.