Having a hashtag for your business can be a useful addition to your online marketing to either get in front of new [relevant] people or to curate your own content together to help people discover more content of the same value. Whether it’s Twitter or Instagram (or arguably any platform these days), using a hashtag is an easy-to-add, effective resource.
What is a hashtag?
Ok, so think of social media as a filing cabinet and each platform is a draw within that cabinet. Let’s use Instagram as an example (but the same is true for the platform of your choosing), each time you include a hashtag (e.g. #emsgrowth), the ‘Instagram drawer’ is opened and inside that drawer, the folder for that topic (e.g. emsgrowth) is pulled out and the Instagram post is popped inside that folder.
When someone checks search results (by either typing the hashtag into the search box on Instagram or by clicking on the hashtag (they’re always clickable)), the drawer of our filing cabinet opens again, the folder relating to the search term is taken out and all the contents of that folder are shown to you in the form of search results.
The hashtag itself is that little tab on the top of the folder – if you include that word – in that way (with a “#” in front of it) – then it will appear in the folder search results for that term.
How do you create a hashtag?
You just type “#” followed by your word, or words. You don’t use any punctuation or spaces and your post will be added to that stream of content. If it doesn’t already exist (i.e. no one’s ever used it before) it’s ‘created’ automatically at the moment.
