Everything You Need to Know About Hashtags!

In this week’s podcast, we are going to be talking all about hashtags! We will be covering: what they are, why you use them, how you can use them to find new followers, how you can use them to attract followers, which ones you shouldn’t use, where you should put them and how many you should use!KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTA hashtag is a word you use to collect together people who have a common interest or theme.Hashtags are great for events because it groups together all the content from everyone who has attended.Hashtags can be used on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.You can have up to 30 hashtags on Instagram – try to use between 20 and 30.It is recommended you use up to 2 hashtags on Twitter and up to 5 hashtags on LinkedIn.You can put your hashtags in your caption or in the first comment.Try to leave a space between your caption and the hashtags using a hard return or dots.Create groups of hashtags for different categories (eg. Travel, family, fun times, books).Save your groups of hashtags to your notes to use again.You need to use relevant hashtags and not the same ones over and over.Use around 5-10 hashtags that are very relevant to your image, then use 20 more general hashtags.Don’t use many hashtags that are too big or too small/niche – people won’t find you. Try to use hashtags that are over 1,000 but under 1 million.Research hashtags on Instagram by using the search function – start to type in a word and it will come up with suggestions and how many people have used that hashtag.Try to think about the hashtags your ideal clients or customers will search for.Look at what hashtags your competitors are using.When coming up with your own hashtag – try to keep it really simple and easy. Check to see if other people are using that hashtag – check it hasn’t been used inappropriately or being used actively all the time.When a hashtag starts to get really popular, you then get spammers who use that hashtag for posts that have no relevance at all. At this point, Instagram then makes the decision to dumb down that hashtag and the effect decreases.Try to avoid using banned hashtags.On an Instagram story, you can use up to 10 hashtags.You can hide your hashtags on Instagram stories by shrinking it down or changing the colour to the background.You can use hashtags to search for content.Follow a hashtag if it is something you are interested in or something your customers might be using.Hashtags are linked so if you click a hashtag it will bring up more content surrounding that topic.Look at your Instagram insights – it will tell you how many impressions you have got through your hashtags! You may be surprised.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Hashtags can be really useful for not only finding new followers, but also to find out what your followers are using and looking at.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSWhat is a hashtag? - 01:39Where do you use hashtags? - 02:15How many hashtags? - 02:45Using hashtags - 04:12What to hashtag - 07:18Hashtag research - 11:38Using your own hashtag - 16:05Banned hashtags - 17:14Using hashtags on Instagram stories - 18:51Other ways to use hashtags - 22:08Transcript below Hello and a really warm welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are you doing? How are things? I hope you're having a good start to your week. If it's Monday, of course. If it's not, then I hope you have a good day. Uh, okay, so today I'm just going to jump straight in with some content and tell you what this week's episode is going to be all about. Now quite a few weeks ago. Probably way more than I'd like to admit. I talked about hashtags on a podcast and said, I'll do an episode about it. And then one of my Academy members obviously listened to that episode and went, where's that episode about hashtags? I can't find it. I was like, Oh, that's because I haven't done it. So today I'm doing you an episode all about hashtags. I'm going to explain what they are, why you use them, how you can use them, find new followers, how you can use them to attract followers, which ones you shouldn't use, where you should put them, how many you should use. What is a hashtag? So we are going to cover off everything to do with hashtags. So let's get going. Okay, first off, what is a hashtag? So basically a hashtag is a word that you use to collect together, people who have a common interest or theme. So for instance, a really good use of our hashtag is at an event. So if you're going to an event, they sometimes have a hashtag for that particular event and therefore you can see what other people are posting about the event. When you post, you could use that hashtag, but basically all it's doing is bringing together people would that common interest. So there's nothing more confusing about it than that. It's just a word you use to find other people who like the same thing as you do. Where do you use hashtags? So where do you use them? Well, I'm going to be specifically be talking about Instagram a lot in this episode.However, they can also be used in Twitter and LinkedIn. I tend not to bother on Facebook. Oh, and you can actually use them on Pinterest. I know I didn't talk about Pinterest a whole lot, but you can use them there as well. So for me, we're really going to be talking about, like I said, Instagram mainly, but some of these things will also be applicable to Twitter and LinkedIn. How many hashtags? So let me start by telling you how many hashtags you're allowed to have. Well on Instagram you can have up to 30 hashtags on a post. If you're using Twitter, they recommend that you use no more than two hashtags and obviously a lot of the reason for that is that you just don't have many characters so you're not going to want to use it up with all the hashtags and LinkedIn. There is no maximum, but their suggestion is no more than five.I think for me, I only tend to use sort of one or two on Twitter but not every time and then I tend to use one or two on LinkedIn, but I do use as close to 30 as I can on Instagram because it has been proven. The more you use the better. Like I said, you can't go over 30 but they do encourage you to use at least 20 hashtags and don't worry. We're going to explain to you how you can do that without having to type out all these words all the time. So let's have some key pointers. So I'm going to split it up into different ways. I'm going to split it up into using hashtags, I. E. On your own staff. And then I'm going to look at how you can use hashtags to find people and search on them and that sort of thing.By the way, I know I'm going to have to say the word hashtag a lot in this episode and already I've said it wrong about four times, so this could take me quite some time to record this episode. Using hashtags Okay, so let's have a look at using them in your own posts. So like I said, mainly I'm talking about Instagram, but this does kind of a um, or some of these things do apply to the other platforms as well. So as I mentioned, you're laid up to 30 hashtags in one post, and I'm talking about the post in your feed, not Instagram stories. So let's talk about, first off, where do you put them in the post? This is a contentious subject, so you can either put them in your caption, I, when you're writing about your picture, you could put some hashtags there or you can put it into comment number one.Now, I would say a while back, if you used quite a lot of hashtags, it looked a bit spammy and I wouldn't say that's the case anymore. I think with Instagram coming out saying use the hashtags, they're actually encouraging you to do it and therefore it doesn't look as spammy. So like I said, I would use as close to 30 as possible and I put mine in the captions. The only reason I put them in the captions is because it's less of a hassle. So if you're going to put them in comment number one, I used to basically have the post ready to go. I would then save my hashtags, I E copied them from somewhere or however I was going to do it. The minute I posted, I'd go straight into comment number one and I'd post those hashtags. Whereas I don't have to do that.If it goes in the caption, the one thing I do do is I do some hard returns and some dots to bring it down the page just so there's a space between the caption itself and the hashtags. So let me explain how I do that. So often people struggled to get spaces and the Instagram caption. Now there is an app you can use called space on. I think that's on iPhone. I don't do that. I tend to do what I call a hard return. So what it is is once you've got to the end of the line and you want a return in that space, make sure there is no space after the end word because if there's a space it does something odd and it won't put the return in and you won't notice that until you post the actual caption or post the post.So what I do is the minute I finish, I don't do a space. I just hit return and hit return. Again. If you're going to put a full stop in, did knock it, sort of push it down the page as it were, you literally get to the end of your sentence, you the last character, whether it be a full stop or just the word you do an immediate return. Don't let there be a space afterwards and then do a full stop. No space after the full stop, immediate return, no space...