Hashtags are essential to the modern social media platform. However, each social media platform treats the quintessential hashtag differently. Understanding where to use this tool on each platform helps a business grow.
Facebook is one of the most common platforms for business. Unfortunately, the platform has been around long enough that they worked the feature in after it had been around a while. Hashtags therefore never took off. Additionally, there was actually a point where too many tags had a negative impact on content views. The best advice for Facebook is to keep it under six hashtags and do not rely on them.
In contrast, Instagram was put together with the idea of category feeds. Since they were part of the original design, hashtags are important. Users do actually follow both the tags and accounts. This makes the tags important. Instagram currently allows 30 tags per post.
Twitter actually encourages hashtags. See, since Twitter has such a low character limit for each tweet, the tags no longer count towards the character limit. That doesn’t mean it’s time to go tag crazy though. After a while, people do get annoyed with hashtag heavy posts. Remember that value still counts more.
Pinterest is unique in that it takes full phrases and hashtags. Some of the most popular posts don’t have any tags in the description. This means the balance in the written fields is vital. Particular audiences necessitate experimentation to find the balance that works.
While these are not the only social media platforms, they are among the most commonly used in the U.S. in 2018. All it takes is one feature change to raise or lower the importance of hashtags. Then it’s to the business owners to stay on top of the next change.