Twitter how does hashtag work

Anyone searching for a specific topic can find relevant tweets immediately rather than having to scroll through their Twitter feed. Twitter's research found that tweets with hashtags increased engagement - clicks, retweets, favourites, and replies - for individuals and brands:.

You can use a hashtag whenever you're referring to a specific topic. For instance, you could use hashtags for:. Don't use hashtags in your adverts if you're trying to drive traffic to your website.

Twitter found that adverts without a hashtag or mention generate 23 percent more clicks. Unsurprisingly, their best practice states:. Avoid hashtags or mentions in your copy so that your audience does not click away from your ad. Now you know the what, why, and when of hashtags , let's see how you can incorporate them in your posts. There's no point in using a hashtag if nobody is searching for it. To help you find trending and popular hashtags for your tweets, utilise these tools.

On the left-hand sidebar under your profile, you'll find a personalised list of the Top 10 Trends :. If you don't like what you see, you can click on 'Change' to select another location:. Hashtagify is a brilliant tool for finding both trending and popular hashtags.

It allows you to discover the best hashtags to reach your audience, gives you custom suggestions, and helps you find your influencers and competitors. Other useful insights include the top countries and languages using the hashtag, to help with geo-specific messages. Plus, there's a Tweets Wall with a snapshot of current Tweets using the hashtag. The premium plans offer more features and data including an extended list of the top influencers, hashtag suggestions for your posts, plus the option to bookmark your favourite hashtags.

Trendsmap shows you the latest trends from Twitter, for anywhere in the world. Click on a word or a hashtag on the map, and you'll get results for that location.

For example, clicking on the word 'rescued' in Canada displays the trending Calgary results for the heroic Thailand cave rescue :. Move the map over to the UK and click on WorldCup to see all the latest trending tweets on the football world cup taking place in Russia:.

Using Trendsmap, you can see how different locations are reacting and discussing trending topics. Armed with that data, you can create messages that are more likely to get discovered by your target audience.

RiteTag is another excellent tool for checking both trending and popular hashtags. For instance, when you enter the term 'social media' , RiteTag produces two lists.

For instant trending results, use the green-coloured hashtags to get seen now :. For long-term popular results, use the blue-coloured hashtags to get seen over time :. But which specific hashtags are most likely to help you gain traction on the platform?

For example, if you choose to use a trending hashtag like WorldCup , but your message and possible link have nothing to do with the FIFA World Cup, then you've gained the wrong attention and audience. Even worse, if enough people complain, Twitter might block your account. For example, the hashtag followme has more than million posts on Instagram. For example, throwbackthursday or flashbackfriday or other daily hashtags can be fun ways for your brand to join a wider social media conversation.

As of June , some of the most popular Instagram hashtags of all time include:. On LinkedIn, popular hashtags include leadership and productivity. So, try to identify niche hashtags that are relevant to your brand and what you represent.

Start by doing a competitive analysis on social media. Make note of which hashtags they use most often and how many hashtags they use in each of their posts. This will help you learn how your competitors are engaging with your shared target audience and which keywords they tend to use.

With this tool, you can search any hashtag and see how popular it is. You can also type in your Twitter or Instagram caption. Then, it will provide you with hashtag suggestions.

RiteTag generates trending hashtag suggestions based on your content. Put simply, search streams make it easy to see which hashtags are the most popular and the most effective. If you already have a good grasp of which hashtags are working well for your brand, consider using related hashtags. On LinkedIn, you can find more hashtag recommendations after clicking on a hashtag. If you notice some of your most popular posts always contain a few of the same hashtags, make a point to include those in your future posts as well.

You can use hashtags anywhere in your Tweets. Use them at the start for emphasis, at the end for context, or in the middle of your post to highlight a keyword. Hashtags are also useful for grouping content in private Facebook groups by theme or topic. This is important for brands to keep in mind considering Facebook is seeing its users shift to private channels. Include hashtags after writing a great Instagram caption. You can also include hashtags in the comments section when engaging with your followers.

And you can include up to 10 hashtags in your Instagram Stories. However, Instagram Stories are no longer featured on hashtag pages or shown to users who follow a tag. For even more tips on Instagram hashtags, read this detailed guide. Click on the hyperlinked hashtag to see a feed with other videos that also use that same hashtag. YouTube will ignore all the hashtags, and maybe even flag your content because of your spammy behaviour. Incorporate hashtags anywhere into your LinkedIn posts.

For more tips, read this guide to using hashtags on LinkedIn. Want to get involved in the conversation, or even start your own? Using a hashtag on Twitter is as simple as publishing a tweet from a public account that includes the hashtag, like this:. A little inspiration for your MotivationMonday. As long as your account is public, anyone who does a search for that hashtag may find your tweet.

There are a few ways to find hashtags on Twitter. If you already know the hashtag you want to search for, there are four main ways to search for it: a simple search, an advanced search, monitoring using a third-party tool, or typing it directly into the URL. If you're searching for a hashtag but want to include more details in your search, try Twitter's Advanced Search.

Here, you can search for tweets with specific words and phrases, written in a certain language, from certain accounts, near certain locations, published on certain dates, and even containing smiley : or frowny : faces. For example, if I wanted to search for the sad MotivationMonday tweets, I might search for the MotivationMonday hashtag with a frowny face, like so:. The results show up in a stream with different toggle options, just like our original hashtag search. You can also use a third-party monitoring tool like HubSpot's Social Inbox to monitor certain hashtags.

These tools will put certain hashtags in a stream beside any other streams you've set up in the tool already. Click here for detailed instructions on how to create monitoring streams. Finally, you can search for a hashtag by typing it directly into a URL like so: twitter.

So MotivationMonday can be found at twitter. If you're searching for popular hashtags from scratch, the best place to look is the trending topics bar on the left-hand side of your homescreen. Popular hashtagged words often become trending topics -- which are topics so many people are talking about that they are a "trend.

By default, Twitter tailors these trending topics to you based on your location and whom you follow. If you want to change the location Twitter uses to tailor your trends, you can do so by clicking "Change" to the right of "Trends. Twitter's native "trending topics" is limited to only a few hashtags, so if you want to find more outside of trending topics and you don't know what to search for, consider using Advanced Search to browse tweets, or a third-party application like Trendsmap.

Along with hashtags for events, campaigns, and promotions, there are these unique things on Twitter called Twitter Chats. I like how Buffer explains them : "Imagine a business networking event -- but without a dress code and with a keyboard instead of a bar.

There are Twitter Chats about pretty much everything, from marketing to personal finance to affinities for cats. If you're looking for Twitter chats to engage in, check out TweetReports' Twitter Chat Schedule , which you can toggle by date, hashtag, and topics like writing, social media, and so on.

You can also submit your own Twitter chats to be considered. Like on Twitter, a Facebook hashtag ties the conversations of different users into one stream. But unlike Twitter and Instagram, where many people have public accounts and their posts can be seen by anyone, most people's Facebook posts and accounts are private.

This means that even if individuals are using hashtags, they aren't searchable. The result? The hashtags you can search for on Facebook tend to be published by influencers, brands, and publishers, rather than by individuals. Here's what a hashtag stream on Facebook looks like, using MotivationMonday as an example:. To use a hashtag on Facebook, all you have to do is publish a Facebook post to your Page or timeline that includes the hashtag.

Be sure your post is public if you want people other than your Facebook friends to be able to find it. To make a Facebook post public, click on the button to the right of "Post" and choose "Public" from the dropdown menu. Once you publish the post to your Page or timeline, the hashtag becomes a clickable link, which takes folks to the hashtag page.

Here's what a Facebook post with a hashtag looks like:. If you already know the hashtag you want to search for, there are two main ways to search for it: a simple search or by typing it directly into the URL. You can also search for a hashtag by typing it directly into a URL like so: facebook.

So MotivationMonday can be found at www. Note: This is currently only available in English in select countries. The articles and hashtags Facebook shows you are based on a number of different factors , including engagement, timeliness, pages you've Liked, and your location.