#Howto #Love #Hashtags for your #contentmarketing.

Today, I'm going to talk about the hashtag. I'm doing that because I was inspired by a conversation with Colin Miles of Zilliqa where he was talking about how hashtags are used to index content. I realized that I've been publishing content myself online and for clients without really understanding the true nature of hashtags, so I'm going to dive into some of the do's and don'ts about hashtags and when and how to use them. The hashtag is the pound symbol on your keyboard. It's also called an octothorpe, apparently, and it was initially used to mark numbers. It was first used as a hashtag in the summer of 2007 by someone called Chris Messina, and it was put forward as a way to index the growing amount of content that was flowing into Twitter without any kind of catalog system. It was then that Chris Messina went into Twitter's office and proposed the use of the pound symbol. It's a generally available symbol, and in America, this octothorpe is on the phone as well as a pound sign. Because Twitter only allows a certain number of characters, instead of asking people to give some kind of explanation or introduction, this is a shortcut to create an index for people that are looking to post information to let others know, if you like, which filing area it should be, and also for people following certain topics to sort through more easily the vast volume of content on the internet. Hashtags can be seen as a way to connect to the growing volume of content with specific topics, people, themes, or conversations, and of course, hashtags no longer only on Twitter. They're being used across Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn since 2018, and YouTube, because the simplicity of the pound symbol means that it can be used across languages and platforms. It's good for both desktop and mobile. I'm not necessarily an expert on hashtags, but I've been doing some research, and I want to share some thoughts and ideas. Now, the hashtag needs to have the hashtag symbol and then the topic or the word (or words) without a space in between them. The social media accounts we're using have got to be public, so that the content can be seen. Otherwise, people wouldn't be able to see the content anyway. What I've discovered is that the best hashtags are relatively short and easy to remember. Also, we need to try and use relevant but specific hashtags, and this is where we move a bit into the science aspect of hashtags, because if a hashtag is too general then you're putting your content into a very large pool of information already. If it's too specific or too custom, then there isn't anybody following it, and therefore, it's not going to appear on anybody's feed. So, the goal is to try and find this compromise, and there are tools for doing that. Hashtags can be used to connect an issue that is beyond the brand that you work for. It could be a way to bring people together. A perfect example of that is the recent #BlackLivesMatter, which has transcended platforms and geographies to unite people around one social cause. There was also the #CovidHeroes campaign by Zilliqa that served as a rallying call for raising money for the Red Cross in Singapore, and it worked very effectively. Clearly, the hashtag can be really a very, very powerful, yet simple way of validating and contextualizing the information that we're going to be sharing, and that information could be in any

video, infographic, text, long-form content, or a podcast. The most popular hashtag of all time is #love with 1.7 billion posts attached to it, which actually doesn't seem that much considering how many people are using hashtags. If you use #love, then there's so much content out there that yours would be one of 1.7 billion. So, we need to find hashtags that are relevant enough to our topics, but broad enough to be relevant to an audience, and this is part of the knack of it. You could have something instead like #lovesickatsea, which could be more specific. I came across a site called RiteTag, and I looked at #lovemybeagle, because Binky, my beagle, is sitting with me now. I was shown that there are four unique tweets per hour on #lovemybeagle, and the hashtag exposure is 167. RiteTag also showed me retweets, which could boost the appeal of #lovemybeagle. RiteTag is one of a number of platforms that can help us to identify just how powerful the hashtag that we'd like to use is going to be. It costs $54 a month. There's another one called Hashtagify, and that's $29 a month for your personal account, $86 for your business account, and $311 for your enterprise account. That sounds like quite a lot lot of money, but let's keep in mind that these services are tracking trending hashtags. They're tracking what influencers are posting with certain hashtags, and they're making recommendations based on these trends and your own content for your own hashtags. These platforms have got trackers, and they do it by the number of data points, so the more expensive programs are tracking more data points. The basic one is tracking 5,000 data points, and they analyze data on Twitter, for example, for a particular given hashtag. And for the people that are using those hashtags, they're able to analyze different interactions as well with that hashtag, so you can see not only which hashtag is trending, but which ones are retweeted. I tried the free version for #lovemybeagle, and if I was selling, for instance, pet food, or if I was selling something like cosmetics, a hashtag generator would help me identify certain trends and currents of information. I could then use the hashtags that are trending to really position my content within the current conversation that's taking place online. That's why it's called social listening. Social listening tools like Hootsuite are helping us understand the narrative that's taking place online before we dive in and start saying things that might be irrelevant. LinkedIn recently allowed hashtags in 2018. They weren't doing that before, nor was Facebook. The number one hashtag on LinkedIn today is #innovation with 38,600,000 uses, followed by #management with 36 million, and #digitalmarketing with 27.5 million. So you can imagine if you're using a hashtag on your LinkedIn posts for #innovation, yours is one of 38 million pieces of content out there, which means that it's going to get lost. So, one of the ways that we can start to look at our hashtags is to find one or two that are resonating for business and for the industry or for the particular trend. We can use one to two hashtags on Twitter, while five to ten are recommended on Instagram. Take note that if we keep changing our hashtags, then our content itself is not being indexed, and what we want to do, of course, is to hashtag our content in a consistent way over time. I've started using #SPEAKpr. I've also started using #GetNoticed, so that all the podcasts, email newsletters, and the audiograms on YouTube are collated under these hashtags. And if we think about hashtags as a way to both index our content and have our content participate or be found by people who are doing social listening, it's important to analyze using these tools like Hashtagify and another one If it all sounds like too much work, you can always opt not Using hashtags is something that I'm learning about myself, and called Flick. o put any hashtags. But it does seem as though if we don't use ashtags, our content really is g ing to be harder for people to f nd, a bit like putting book in the library. I was a libr rian when I was in North Caro ina's Chapel Hill Univ rsity, and we had the Libr ry of Congress book numb rs. In England, we use the Dewe Decimal System. The hash ag system is, in a way, a very primitive equivalent to the Libr ry of Congress or the Dewey Deci al System in that it's tryi I'm interested to work with the people over at Zilliqa to see g to make sense in order of a gr at volume of information. Just as we would want our book on he shelf to have a Dewey De imal number, we also want our c ntent to be indexed. We'd also ike our books to be in t e section where the popular boo s. how we can boost our own hashtags here at EastWest PR. should be spending more time earning about how I should be ndexing my content, because cont nt creation is only part of th job. One statistic suggests th t content marketing is 20% co tent generation and 80% mar eting, and hashtags definitely f ll within that 80%. We've talke about hashtags and the tools y u can use to help select th right hashtags for your b siness, and while it's a rela ively simple topic, it's one t at becomes more and more co plex. We need to think about hat we're saying and how it can e seen and also what we'