SwipeTown Academy

When you start using social networks you start to know new terms, Timeline, Feed, Engagement, Analytics and many more, because you see them frequently and you start to familiarize yourself with them until they also become part of your vocabulary.

One of those terms we’ve started to use since the Internet and social networking boom is the hashtag, which can be translated as a tag and was first used in 2007.

Hashtags work very well as long as you know how to use them. The truth is that it’s not too complicated, you just have to pay attention to it.

1. What is a Hashtag and how does it work?
2. Hashtags most used by social media.
3. How do I know which tags to use in my publications?
4. 6 Tools to monitor hashtags.

1. What is a Hashtag and how does it work?

It can be a word or a set of words that are written without spaces between them and are preceded by a pound sign (#).

Its function is to group publications into a category so that users can quickly get them.

In other words, they are keywords that become a link and lead people who click on them to be redirected to find other publications that have also been tagged as part of that category. It is a kind of information bank that is fed by users.

The hashtags not only exist so that users can find the content that interests them in a simpler way, but also to know which are the people who have used this label, the accounts that participate, what has been the contribution of each one (in the case of users).

For those content creators or those in charge of managing profiles in social media, hashtags are tools for categorizing their content, making it more visible as it will be grouped with other publications within the same classification, which facilitates the search.

When you use good hashtags your publication is more likely to be discovered and become prominent.

2. Hashtags most used by social media

Instagram

On Instagram the most used hashtags have to do primarily with lifestyle:

#Love #Fashion #PhotoOfTheDay #Photography #Art #Beautiful #Happy #Travel #Nature and #PicOfTheDay.

It can be said that these tags are used generically and many times users in their eagerness to highlight, use the hashtags mentioned above so their publication has nothing to do with it.

This is the kind of thing you should take care of when managing a corporate profile, the tags you use should place your posts within their relevant category.

It is also important to create your own hashtag as a brand, but we will refer to this later.

Twitter

On Twitter hashtags work in almost the same way. They group tweets on a specific topic.

The most popular in one period are listed in Trending Topics, which means it’s a topic that’s in vogue at the moment.

The popularity of hashtags on Twitter is temporary.

Trending Topics is a list that appears on the left side of the computer screen when you use the web version and groups together the topics that are generating the most on Twitter at a global, national or local level, depending on your configuration.

The list is made up of hashtags and also of phrases/names/words that don’t necessarily have to be tags.

A couple of years ago was the tenth anniversary of this social network and came out a list of the most popular hashtags in recent years where the winner turned out to be #FollowFriday, which had great popularity and is still used on Fridays (although in less quantity) to recommend other users interesting accounts to follow.

Facebook

For its part, Facebook has a hashtags policy similar to that of Instagram, although people do not use them as much on this platform as on its younger sister.

In 2017 the most popular hashtags as measured by the most used social network in the world were: #Love #Me #Cute #PhotoOfTheDay #Happy #Beautiful #Self #Girl #PicOfTheDay and #Smile. Which when analyzed are a mixture of generic labels.

3. How do I know which tags to use in my publications?

This is one of the most recurrent questions regarding this topic, so to clarify it you must take into account some aspects:

• Hashtags should not be too long. Write a caption and try to integrate the hashtags as naturally as possible. Normally a hashtag should not have more than 4 words at most.

  For example, “#YogaLovers afternoon in #NY” instead of “Afternoon yoga in NY #YogaLovers #NY”.

• You should not use more than 10 hashtags per publication. Remember that you are categorizing it, so it is counterproductive that it can fit into so many classifications. The amount of hashtags must be balanced.

• Take care of the writing of the hashtag, if you make a typing error you will automatically be tagging the publication in a different category than the one you want and the one your audience will be looking for.

• Don’t use punctuation marks as they break the hyperlink.

• Keep in mind that Instagram now takes as its starting point to classify the most recent the date you uploaded the image, and not the time you added the hashtags to it, so you must upload both at the same time.

• Include a hashtag that identifies your brand. This must not specifically have the name of the brand.

• Use words or phrases that your audience is looking for. For example, if you’re managing a clothing store profile, check which hashtags are most used in that area and include them in your publication. In this case, some of the most relevant would be #Fashion #OOTD (#OutfitOfTheDay) #Style, among others.

• If applicable, try to join the general conversation at that time. For this you can be guided by the dates, the events that are happening that are relevant to your target, and more.

Hashtags help build the personal brand and position the corporate brands, so you need to devote time to your choice. The more experience you get, the less time it takes.

One very important thing to do is to study the hashtags before using them. Maybe you think it’s an exaggeration, but it’s not. There are tools to monitor the performance of hashtags and you can use them to go on safe in the placement of them.

4. 6 Tools to monitor hashtags

Hashtags for Likes

This is an application that you can download to your mobile device and shows you which are the most popular hashtags in Instagram -by category- at the time you are performing the search.

Some of the categories in which you can see the hashtags are: Popular, Nature, Animals, Social/People, Family, Urban, Food, among many others.

To use it you only need to know the general category in which your publication is classified and review the most popular hashtags for it.

Rite Tag

It is in charge of helping you find the most suitable hashtags for the publication you are planning to share.

Keyhole

This tool allows you to monitor the performance of the hashtag (users, scope, impressions) that you want to evaluate to know if it is correct to use it in your publication.

Hashtagify

It is excellent and one of the most used because it not only shows you the performance of the hashtag you want to know, but also gives you comparisons with other similar hashtags so you have more information to make your decision.

Trendsmap

In case you need information about the geographic performance of Twitter hashtags, this tool does that job because it shows only the most current conversation topics in real time and anywhere in the world.

Metricool

If you want reports with graphs, statistics and data on everything you can – and need to – know about any Twitter hashtag, this is one of the most comprehensive tools there is to do it.

Last but not least, it is important to remember that this information is something that is constantly updated, so if you are in charge of social media management or an influencer you need to evolve along with social networks.