Blog / The Power of #

First off, this blog’s title would be a lot cooler if we all still pronounced “#” as “pound.”

But nooooo, Stowe Boyd had to go and rename it to “hashtag.” I personally would have preferred “poundtags,” but no one asked me.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can get to the vegan meat alternative of this matter: the # and why you should use it.

Think of the hashtag as the search engine of social media. When someone tags their post with a hashtag, anyone on social media can search for that tag and be able to see that post. By using hashtags appropriately, you can make your posts more visible to people who might be interested in your business. For example, if your business sells shoes, you can create a post about a new shoe design you just started selling and use #shoes. Someone might search for #shoes when they’re looking for a new outfit, and they see your post—now you’ve just gained a new customer and follower!

You’ve probably heard of “trending,” but what exactly does that mean? Trending is when a hashtag is used frequently in a short time in your local area. If everyone in Yakima is posting pictures of their dog using #dogsareawesome, that hashtag will be officially trending. You can start your own trends by creating hashtags that will be popular, or you can piggyback onto hashtags that are already trending. Just be careful to only use trending tags if they are actually applicable to your business. If you’re going to use #dogsareawesome from above, you should probably own a pet store.

Hashtags are also the master organizers of social media. Let’s say you have a big event coming up called “Dance Party Fundraiser.” You could create #dancingforacause and use it for all of your posts building up to the day of the event. Then, you can encourage people to use that hashtag to tag any photos they take while at the event. This will allow you to use a variation of the hashtag for next year’s event, like #dancingforgood—this way, everything will be nicely organized year to year. For an organization junkie like myself, this is totally my cup of tea.

If you can master the use of the hashtag, you’ll be #ing it with the best of them.

#pound