Before sharing about the usage of the hashtag, we should discuss what hashtags actually are. Briefing out the definition, it is “a social media tagging system to categorise content into parts”. It does not only lead to the benefit of content marketing but also provides you with branding on your online business.

A hashtag can be used as a content description in short or can be used as a clickable page to link to. Starting with a “#” symbol, it signifies the word hash with a tag as a content in it. They are helpful in tying the content together. For instance, #socialmediamarketing, #onlinemarketing, #onlinebusiness are all examples for hashtags. The hashtag does not permit the use of spaces in between.

The concept is really unique and it came across in the year 2009. The first hashtag floated was #barcamp by Chris Messina. They were first talked about as “Twitter grouping” which means twitter made it famous for the first time.

How do business benefit from the hashtags?

The hashtag is first and foremost a key success to social media marketing. It helps to bring in free traffic by making use of the content efficiently. It does not only provide the online presence for business’ products and services, it also helps in matching up a conversation on a particular topic about the business. The main idea is to stick with it and make it more relevant.

The hashtag can be of any type and any category. For example:

• Gossip: #talkitive, #chatterpatter
• Mood: #happy, #funny, #nostalgic
• Season:, #sunnyday, #wednesday
• Feeling: #inlove, #caring

These can be of an infinite type as per your imagination and thinking. Therefore, hashtags as a part of marketing is the best online free content or topic tool to go for and is worth using. It has various trends on various social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Google+. It is not encouraged to be used in LinkedIn because of the platform’s nature of displaying professionalism. Here, we will be sharing the usage of the hashtag in some of the social media platforms.

Twitter

Twitter is where the hashtag originally came from. It has been surveyed that 40% of the people retweet on twitter using the hashtag you mention. That means, 40% of the tweets get retweeted if they have hashtags in it. Which is why the concept of ‘trending’ came about. When a particular hashtag is often used either by tweets or retweets, the more viral it becomes. Users are able to include as many hashtags as they like as long as it is within the 140 character limit.

Facebook

There is over a billion active base in Facebook and the usage of the hashtag will help you get more interactions. However, limit your posts from 1-2 hashtag is sufficient. 1-2 hashtags will give you an average of 598 interactions per post. However, it is not encouraged to put too many hashtags on Facebook as it is not a full-fledged search engine for users. The purpose of hashtag in Facebook helps readers to understand in a glance the topic of the post.

Instagram

The photo sharing app rely heavily on hashtags to help users find the product and services they are looking for. Using multiple hashtags will help you in 80% of interactions. The more hashtag you have, the more interaction you will receive. In Instagram, you can put up to a maximum of 30 hashtags.

Google+

The criticality of using the hashtags in Google+ is more. It helps in doubling the chances of getting the right form of traffic. With Google being the primary search engine in the market, having more hashtag in Google+ will also help in getting free traffic and interactions.