What Is A Hashtag And How Do I Use It?

Trying to navigate the social media landscape can be a confusing and sometimes overwhelming process for most individuals. From understanding where to post, to developing captions that are witty or eye catching, we as content creators can find ourselves fixating on only one or two elements of social media posting and forgetting the rest. Other elements such as hashtags, have great utility within social media, and when leveraged properly can increase our visibility and connectivity within our social media platform.

I am here today to help explain what hashtags are as well as how their function can lead to better engagement within your current audience! So let's dive into the first question at hand: what is a hashtag?

Hashtags are a type of metadata tag used on social networks such as Twitter and other social media spaces, that allow users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging which makes it possible for others to easily find messages with a specific theme or content. In other words, hashtags are searchable words or phrases that allow users to find other users within a platform. These words or phrases can be very specific (#BrysonHollomonsWixBlog) or general (#FunFridays) depending on who you want your audience to be, but keep in mind the more specific your hashtag is the lower the chance other users will know how or what to search when trying to find you!

So, you might be asking yourself, "How do I know what hashtags to use, and what hashtags are to specific?" Well, the answer to that lies within free social media analytics tools such as Ritetag.com that allow you to search your potential hashtags to see how effective they are on different social media spaces.

As you can see, when I searched #FunFriday a few different things appeared. Ritetag will first break down the hashtag into different social media spaces, and will also show you similar hashtags that garner large engagement within these platforms. In addition to identifying different hashtag options, the analysis tool breaks down your hashtag by a few metrics to help you determine what is most effective. The metrics seen above (from left to right) tell you who is using your hashtag, how many retweets this hashtag has received, the amount of impressions, images that have this hashtag in the caption, links that have this hashtag, and percentage of people who are using this hashtag.

After taking a look at these different metrics it becomes easier to understand what hashtag you might want to use in order to reach your greatest audience. Optimization of hashtag usage is definitely a powerful aspect of social media posting that can make a substantial difference in connecting with your current and future audience. Hopefully this has given you a better understanding of what a hashtag is and how you can use it to increase your platform's social media activity in the future!