Use The Best Hashtags For Social Media Marketing

Those funny #Words – or hashtags – are used by people today on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Instagram with specific keywords for their content topic. One of the key ingredients to social media marketing success is to know how to use these to attract the right followers, find the right people to connect with and to attract more attention to your tweets and posts… simply by using and following the right hashtags.
But where do you start?
In the following article on Search Engine Watch the proper use of Hashtags on social media is explained with some great examples and video:

#Hashtag Success For Social Media Marketing

Hashtags were a user-innovation that was later adopted by Twitter as an actual feature when Twitter decided to hyperlink hashtags to search results. The rest of the socialsphere followed in its own pace, and Facebook, my wife’s go-to social destination, only recently decided to give in and add hashtags as a feature. It’s no surprise that for the masses over the age of 30, hashtags are still a novelty.
So whether you’re in that group, or just want a short social history lessons, here’s the brief history of hashtags. Then we’ll look at a few recent examples of brilliant marketing uses of hashtags.

A Brief History of Hashtags

There seems to be a consensus on the origin of hashtags and most people attribute the proposal to use hashtags in tweets to Chris Messina, through a tweet dating back to August 23, 2007.

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?
— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

But the first time a hashtag was used extensively as a way to categorize tweets and was adopted by the public was during the San Diego fire on October 23, 2007, when Nate Ritter used Twitter to report on the fire and included the hashtag #sandiegofire.
On July 2, 2009, Twitter officially embraced hashtags and hyperlinked them to search results. Tumblr was one of the early adopters of hashtags when it launched hashtags on August 18, 2009. A few months later, on March 30, 2010, in another homepage redesign, Twitter moved Trending Topics to its homepage, formalizing hashtags as a conversation driver on Twitter.
As Twitter users adopted hashtags as a normal part of the Twitter conversation, in a typical fashion to Twitter, hashtags stared in popular culture like TV shows, celebrities’ promotions and mainstream media. Read more about Hashtags in Social Media in 5 Brilliant Ways to Use Hashtags in Social Media Marketing here.
Hashtags not only make your content easier to find on social media, but they also separate you from the ‘spam,’ and attract the right readers to communicate with. Brands and businesses can take advantage of spreading the word on their company, like #Nike and #Starbucks.
Other benefits of Hashtags include an increased number of retweets and shares from your audience, which helps to grow your following and traffic to your website. They key is to keep them as short as possible, and easy to read. Pay attention to what influencers are using in their social sharing, and stay ahead of the game with trends, which Facebook is now participating in on profiles.
As social media and trends change, you will want to modify or even create your own Hashtags in order to reap the most benefits from them. For more tips and tools read my article, “How Hashtags Work and Using Them to Grow Your Traffic.”
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