For the first time, the word "hashtag" was used by the creators of the social network Twitter to denote a word or phrase preceded by the # symbol. Soon, hashtags spread across all popular world social networks.
Not so long ago, the # sign stood for the pound sign or the pound sign. Now this symbol has become so popular thanks to social networks that it has begun to be associated with hashtags.
For a person who first encountered hashtags, they may seem like something strange and incomprehensible, and some may even seem completely useless. However, you just need to understand a little about their purpose, with the convenience that they provide to users, and hashtags will become an indispensable tool for promoting and searching for posts on social networks.
What is a #hashtag?
In order to understand how to correctly put down hashtags, you need to understand the essence of their use. And it is very simple. Keywords or combinations in social networks, preceded by a # sign, become available not only to your subscribers, friends and members of your communities, but also to absolutely all people with similar interests. For example, if a user is interested in learning about the city of Kharkiv, he enters the hashtag # Kharkiv or #kharkov into the search, after which he will find all publications related to Kharkiv in the search results. In this case, all posts of users who indicated a hashtag in their data records will be available in the search results.
Recently, hashtags are gaining more and more popularity and, accordingly, an increasing number of users are starting to use them, both to find the necessary information and to publish posts with these links.
How to choose the right hashtag?
In order to put a hashtag in your post, you just need to put the # symbol in front of the desired word or phrase. You do not need to type a space between the hash and the word. If you use a hashtag for a phrase, it must be written without spaces, for example, # icy rain or # icy_ rain. It is allowed to put hashtags anywhere in the post. You can put them at the beginning of the post before the main text, or you can harmoniously integrate them into the main text. The main thing is that hashtags must be relevant. Otherwise, users will not be able to find the records that contain them.
In no case should you overload published posts with hashtags. Firstly, it looks cumbersome, and secondly, it scares off users. On Twitter and Instagram, it is customary to use up to five hashtags per post, as these networks are designed for visual content, in which hashtag search is key for users. On social networks with mixed content, such as Facebook, Google+ and Vkontakte, the use of hashtags should be clearly limited, since a large number of them can be perceived by users as spam.
