Love your hashtag!

All you have to lose is the pristine gleam of the button on your keyboard you don’t use very much and you could gain more followers. Find out how to use and love hashtags…

What’s the point of hashtags anyway?

Hashtags help you categorise your posts and tweets and should help them be more visible on search.

Is it always good to use a hashtag?

While hashtags work well and tend to be used frequently on Twitter and Instagram, the story is less clear on Facebook. Certainly using more than one or two # in a Facebook post tends to reduce engagement and sharing of the post. Some people feel hashtags make no difference on Facebook, some experts say they have a negative effect and others say they work but you have to use them correctly. Find out what works on your page and if you really want to use a # but find it has a negative effect, think about using the # in an image instead.

Can I make up my own hashtag?

Yes – and this can be useful for monitoring reactions (you can search on your own # and find out what people are saying). Be careful about creating your own hashtags though and always do a search first to find out if or how your ‘newly created’ hashtag has been used in the past. A hashtag doesn’t have any spaces so be careful about unfortunate word combinations!

Which hashtags are most powerful?

When you start typing in a hashtag into a tweet, popular options will be suggested that are already in use. So for instance, type in #dog and suggestions will include #dogsoftwitter, #dogs, #dogtweets and #Using one of those options could help improve your impressions (the number of times your tweet showed up on feeds or searches).

Check out Hashtagify.me as that will tell you what the most popular Twitter hashtags are in relation to your topic. It ranks #s both on popularity, how well they correlate to your search term and if they are trending (becoming more popular in recent weeks or months). Use popular hashtags to get your tweet seen more often.

Is it possible to use too many hashtags?

Yes #justsaying