An Optimistic Look at Hashtag Symbol Usage
A century ago the only thing mankind dreamt of was to have unlimited access to information, and soon it became possible with the Internet. Time moves on, and the Internet develops new options. So, now we can enjoy fast and convenient search with the help of hashtags.
How Can You Define Hashtag?
Hashtag is quite a new phenomenon and it stands for a single word or phrase without spaces and with a hash character before the word/phrase. Hashtags reside on social networking sites and microblogs (like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).
How does it work? The primary function is a fast search: you click a hashtag or type it in a search line and get myriads of results where this hashtag has been used.
If you are eager to learn more about hashtags and would like to find those, which will help you stay in trend, then you need to know that websites for hashtag research exist. The amount of options available on the websites include checking random or searching for a particular hashtag as well as checking a top list of the most popular and newly created hashtags. As a rule, you can contribute to the website by adding a new item. Check some of them and use for your future research: #tagdef, Hashtagify, TOPSY.
Needless to say that hashtags have obvious pluses. However, for every plus there is a minus. Yet, advantages prevail. Let’s have a look at them.
The Bright Side of Hashtags
Quick access to the information you need as it’s classified and tagged
Perhaps it’s the first and main advantage of hashtags – you get everything fast. You don’t need to make lots of efforts to find a hashtag on the web – just click the one you looking for mentioned in a text or elsewhere and see where it’s used or type it manually in a search line.
Keeping everything in order
Suppose you have too many photographs on Instagram and need to sort them: separate portraits from landscapes. Ask the Aladdin’s lamp to help you out – hashtags. For each category choose a corresponding name (word/phrase), insert a hash character before it – and voila, you have categories!
You get noticed
If you dream about an online fame, hashtags will assist you perfectly well. It works quite simply: you use some of trendy hashtags to label your post or photo and then it appears in the list of others having the same hashtag. Don’t be surprised, when a number of your followers doubles abruptly. For getting noticed companies make a hashtag too. Thanks to this, customers differentiate unique hashtags of the product/service company promotes from the billions of others.
Easy to follow trends
You’re interested in something and want to learn more about this. For example, you want to enjoy a really great concert or music show. The only thing you need to do is to type appropriate hashtag into the search line. After you attend the concert you’re likely to see some photos from the event. And for now you know what to do to see them.
Find people with the same interests
Do you like yoga? Click a yoga hashtag and find people who like it as much as you do or search for a yoga workshop where you can join a yoga community and talk to a fellow-thinker.
The dark side of hashtags
You cannot control your hashtag usage
Your hashtags live their own lives. You really cannot influence the fact people use hastags created by you. Sometimes they may use them in a wrong context or just in order to get noticed by means of your recognizable hashtag.
Hashtag overuse annoys
Yes, you can be noticed and get more followers, but when you overload your posts with hashtags, well, be ready to lose some of the followers too.
What do we have? Pluses of hashtags are two times more numerous than their minuses. And hashtags certainly have a huge power in promoting products as you join the global web community and assert yourself effectively or anything you promote. Why won’t you take an advantage of this powerful instrument then?
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