What are Hashtags and How Is it helping Social Media algorithms?
Hashtags are a special symbol that is hugely used in the modern era on various social media platforms for various uses. According to recent reports, 125 million hashtags are used every day on Twitter alone. Hashtags have indeed brought a revolution on social media platforms as well as in the real world quite literally. Hashtags are generally used under shared photos as a caption or tweets for social media to pull the post into the trending algorithm. So how do these hashtags work and what purposes do they serve and how to appropriately use them? Let’s discuss the answers to these questions.
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What are Hashtags and How does it Work?
Hashtags are metadata symbols through which contents are sorted out according to certain themes and topics. The concept of hashtags works as links basically. Hashtags are clickable and basically transfer you to the desired content or information about the topic and theme that you are looking for.
For example, hashtags on Twitter categorize tweets with related topics or themes under one hashtag and people can use the common hashtag in order to make something trending or bring the topic to much-needed attention. Twitter basically has a trending section where categories that are trending and come under a certain hashtag can be accessed to read various threads and conversations surrounding the topic.
What Purpose do Hashtags serve?
Hashtags work as a means of filtering content according to the consumer’s thoughts, ideas and interests. Hashtags basically help social media in understanding their users’ interests and filter out content relating to that theme and topic. It doesn’t just help the platform in order to provide content but also helps its users to consume what they want. As we discussed earlier on how hashtags work on Twitter, based on that so many revolutionary acts have taken place due to this informational content consumed. People have initiated rallies, protests, and all sorts of various rebellious movements because of the support they got about the righteous thing they were about to commence.
Social Media has to be the most united yet diversified thing humans have created so far, people on it are so diverse and filled with various opinions and thoughts and come to this one common ground and share their thoughts and perspectives and discuss and come to a settlement. As toxic as it can get, it can also be one of the most wholesome places.
How to appropriately use hashtags?
Let’s take an example to understand how to appropriately use hashtags. Let’s say you are posting a picture of your vacation in a certain place, you can select the pictures and then type “#” and type the most obvious things that the picture portrays. Let’s say you posted a picture about your vacation on a beach, the appropriate hashtags to use would be #beach or #seashore and stuff like that. It would be irrelevant to use a hashtag that would portray some other meaning to it such as #hostel or something like that. Taking these notes and your content would easily be on the trending page.
Conclusion
Hashtags are definitely very useful and a good source for media consumption and getting posts that are relevant to you and your liking, various platforms have started using the hashtags such as Facebook (now Meta), Instagram as well as YouTube as some of the prime examples. Although every application uses hashtags differently, the main motive is to bring attention and filter out content. Hope this article was helpful.
