https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JTcPZ9wHm8

Hi everyone, Trynda here.

Today, I’m bringing you a video about hashtags on social media. I’ve been doing a lot of research into how you use hashtags in your social media posts so, I thought I would share the tips that I’ve learned along the way with you guys. If you don’t know what a hashtag is, it’s basically a searchable keyword that allows two posts that are similar in content to be linked together. I’ve noticed that some authors don’t use hashtags as well as they could be so, I thought these tips would be useful to the community in general. If you’re interested in the hashtags specific to authors, then I suggest you hang on until the very end and we will get to those.

So, first off, I’m going to talk about formatting. When you’re putting hashtags in your posts, you don’t want to make them too long or too hard to read. They suggest keeping it no more than two to four words at max and if you have multiple words in the hashtag, you should be using CamelCase which is where you capitalize the first letter of each word in that sentence. When it comes to the frequency of hashtags you’re using in your post, it varies greatly between site to site. So, what I’m going to be covering today is Facebook, Twitter and instagram.

So, Twitter is basically where it all started originally and they recommend not putting more than two to four hashtags in a post otherwise, it comes off looking spammy and that really factors in heavily when you’re putting it on every single word. You want to try and avoid doing that because it comes off like you’re just a robot and that’s something you really want to avoid when you’re on social media.

The next one is instagram.
There’s a lot of variation on the amount of hashtags to put in particular post. Some people say between 11 and 30 which seems really high to me and some people said between two and three which also seems very low for instagram. So, I tend to put around five to ten hashtags on mine and I find that that works for getting a bit of engagement for me. A lot of this stuff depends on your audience and your analytics.

I’ll cover Facebook a little bit more in-depth because that one has a little bit more to it because it was a little bit late to the hashtag game and people didn’t seem to catch on to it the same way. This is mostly because on Facebook, it’s more influencers, brands and promoters trying to get their content across and this is just because most people who use Facebook have private personal accounts opposed to public promotional pages. So, with Facebook, they recommend not putting any more than two hashtags in a post.

Some people recommend putting them at the end of the post and some people recommend putting them in the post itself. I personally find that there’s not much difference for me so, I tend to put them in the post itself because it goes along my to me and it makes it easier to read I find. But that’s me and that’s my audience so, it definitely depends on what your audience is reflecting by how your insights area on the Facebook page is showing and if you haven’t looked at that, then you definitely should because that would give you all the analytics for the Facebook page and how your posts are performing. Twitter has something similar with the analytics area on their site and I would recommend looking into that as well. Instagram unfortunately doesn’t have a built in analytics area but a quick google search and you can find any type of analytics tool that suites your needs for Instagram.

I’m going to get into some specific author related hashtags now. If you’re ever wondering what type of hashtags people are using, you can look at other people’s posts and also search on their actual social media platform itself. That can be a huge help for finding what hashtags people are talking about at that time. You can also use a site called Hashtagify.me and that’ll tell you which ones are doing better than others and which ones have a bit more conversation going on about them. So, some of the really popular ones are:

Writing Specific

  • #amWriting 
  • #amEditing
  • #WIP
  • #writersLife
  • #writersTip

Genre Specific

  • #Fantasy /  #ScienceFiction
  • #amWritingFantasy
  • #amWritingScienceFiction
  • #YALit
  • #Mystery

I could go on forever because it’s basically whatever genre you’re writing in and that’s a really popular one that helps you connect with people or your same genre.

There’s also a few more like I do such as #MotivationMonday & #ShakespeareSunday.

Those aren’t necessarily specific to the author community but those ones can help you get your exposure out there to communities that you may not necessarily connect with otherwise.

So, I think that’s it for now guys, if you enjoyed this video, make sure to leave a like and subscribe to my channel. I would love to hear what you guys are using for hashtags in your posts so, leave a comment down below so we can chat about it a little more or you can connect with me on social media, I’m @TryndaEAdair on all social media platforms. Revival Episode 3 is now available and you can also preorder Revival Episode 4. If you haven’t experienced anything in the Revival series, then I’ll recommend checking out the Revival Prologue which is a free short story that I wrote back in 2012.

So, that’s it for now guys and I will talk to you guys later.

Go Not Gently by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Artist – http://audionautix.com/