Hey y'all. It's that time again for another WordPress Wednesday.
My name is Kori Ashton here at WebTegrity in San Antonio, Texas.
We're going to continue our series on social media marketing.
A couple of weeks ago we did Facebook, Twitter, Periscope and Instagram.
We've already talked about all of those so if you missed out on those, be sure to
take a look back at a couple of our videos.
I'll put a link in the description box below as well so you can find those videos
easily.
I know as we've been discussing all this cool social media stuff people are really
struggling with the idea of, "what the heck is a hashtag?
We're going to look at that today. What the heck
is a hashtag?
How do you know which hashtag words to use or what's the best thing to do?
That's what we're looking at.
This is obviously what a hashtag looks like- a pound sign, a tic-tac-toe sign
(whatever it is.)
I tell you what,
it's a really powerful tool that you can use
to hopefully attract brand new customers.
I'll explain that here in just a second.
If you've ever looked up this topic of what the heck is a hashtag,
you've probably run across
really odd videos like
(sorry, showed you who it was- I was going to try to block it but)
this video is completely confusing.
Is it confusing to you?
Listen to this.
What?
What she's saying is really confusing.
I'm already lost and I know what a darn hashtag is.
Here's what I want you to think of a hashtag.
It's a keyword.
That's all it is.
You understand what keywords are because
you've been working on your website. You've been trying to add in those
keywords so that people can find you on search engines.
That's exactly what a hashtag is.
It's a signifier to let people know what you're writing about.
I'm going to show you an example right here over on WebTegrity's
Facebook page.
You can use hashtags on pretty much any social media now (Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Vine, Pinterest.)
You can use them anywhere.
We're going to be looking at
this post here and I've hashtag'd the word WordPress.
Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Here's the thing that you need to clearly understand about hashtags.
Anybody who's following you on whatever social platform it is,
will see your posts anyway.
They're always going to see it because they've already liked your page, they've
already engaged with you, they've already said, "yes I'll follow you."
Hashtags are best used to attract new people who might be searching for your
topic or for that specific hashtag that you have here on your post.
I have WordPress hoping that anybody out there in the Facebook world who is
searching for #WordPress
would discover my page, discover our tutorials and ultimately subscribe to our
YouTube channel.
I'll walk you through just a couple of more as we scroll down through here.
I've done WordPress here again talking about our videos.
Here's one with SEO. SEO is not a one time fix. This is a past video I did.
Anybody who might be in Facebook doing a quick search for SEO tips
or SEO resources might be able to find me and discover me as a new resource for them.
When clients go off like this, all that's left to do is #DropTheMic.
See how I put three words there together?
I am one that capitalizes every single beginning of the new word.
You do not have to do that.
For me it's easier to read.
#DropTheMic and #Thankful.
You might say, "Well those are silly. Those aren't going to attract new clients."
You're right.
Those are just something fun to do and it really is (I could've done a hashtag on
customer review, #CustomerReview.)
This is a customer just giving us a lot of love and it's pretty cool.
There are all sorts of cool ways to use a hashtag by grouping those words together.
I'm going to show you how to find out which ones are the right words to use.
There's some resources. If you're not happy with Twitter, (you don't really know
about Twitter very much) you need to start using it because inside of Twitter
(once you login to your account)
you get this really cool left side over here that shows you trending topics right
now. This is real time trending topics with today in this moment.
You've got #WednesdayWisdom,
you've got #PrayForSyria and some really other ones that are pretty cool and
dynamic. #GlobalDevelopment- look at all these different ones.
Pretty cool there.
That's a quick resource for you.
You can also find some other ones throughout the web.
I'm going to show you a couple of different websites that'll help you out.
This one is top trending hashtags over on Instagram.
These will show you the most popular 100 different hashtags.
This is kind of cool also to just come here and see if you're using the right
version of a hashtag. Maybe you're doing #iloveyou every time and it's just
supposed to be #loveyou. That's the one that's trending more.
How would you know that unless you came here and did a little bit of research?
You can look down through here and see all the different ones
that are trending currently today.
I'll put the link again to these websites in the description box below for you.
Another one that's pretty cool is Trendsmap.
This one is
just a real time map of the United States and you can actually move it around if you
wanted to and go to different countries if you'd like to
and see what's trending in our areas.
That's pretty cool. You can also just do a specific search for your zip code or
your city and see what's trending specifically in your area.
Let's do San Antonio just to show you what that looks like.
San Antonio
and trending here- @shawnmendes, #hiring.
So that's pretty cool.
San Antonio's hiring and you can always do a hashtag for hiring on there.
I don't know. Some of these others are different. Duncan- (of course) he just
retired so that's
trending news right now in our area.
Another really cool resource for you is tagboard.com. You can come here and
just do a quick search to see what might be
working better.
All these will be in the description box below.
I wanted to show you-
I've got a couple of clients that do window treatments, blinds and shades
and shutters. If you're looking to see, "what should I be using for that?"
Should I be using window
shutters? Is that a trending topic? Let's see. I'm just going to enter it in
here and just click enter and see what it comes up with.
We're just seeing what all is in here and you can see that each one of these
resources that has been pulled up.
Each one of these either Twitter post
or Facebook post or Google+ post- these kind of resource all over the web.
This is a Flickr post.
That's a Facebook post.
They go out and kind of see across all social media networks what's trending more.
Window shutters- it's okay. Let's try something else.
Let's do window treatments
and see how great this term might
work for us.
I'm just going to scroll down and there's definitely more. Look at this already.
A lot more. They're also more current.
This one was just yesterday. That's pretty cool.
There's Twitter posts in here, Facebook posts in here using it, Flickr posts in
here using it.
Pretty awesome. There's a Google+ one here.
Of course, you're going to find those hashtags right inside here.
Whats cool about this resource for you is
you can see what other people might be using alongside the keyword that you've
already thought about.
This person is using window treatments as well as design ideas as well as curtain
rods because that's what this story is all about
and home decor.
Who knows? You should be maybe using that home decor.
Maybe you haven't thought about that one yet.
Check that one out. You can click on that here and kind of see.
Go over here and see what all is trending on Google+ for home decor.
Google+ is another really awesome resource to find anything that's trending.
They've got all sorts of areas here. You can just start to do a quick search.
Here we can do #windowtreatments inside of
Google+.
It'll load and basically show you.
Look at this.
This is probably one of my most favorite and I'm going to leave you on this one
because it's really just extraordinary.
Inside of Google+ it'll give you some options for what might be other keywords
(in a sense)- hashtags that you could be using alongside this.
I just did a search for window treatments.
It also says some other hashtags that could potentially work are curtains,
shutters, window coverings, interior design, Hunter Douglas (of course that's
a brand,) so forth and so on.
You can get some ideas of other hashtags that you might not have thought about yet.
Maybe just thought, "that would never be one I would use."
Google+ says, "yes use it they're trending it's awesome.
I lied. A couple of more. Tagdef.com. This basically tells you the definition
of a tag. This is a kind of cool resource.
I'll throw a couple of more in the description box below.
There are going to be some premium ones I'll put in here that you can end up
paying for different accounts
and learning more and more about what's trending on hashtags.
If you have a better way of explaining this (if you've heard somehow a
different way of explaining what a hashtag is)
will you put that in the comments below so we can kind of all share our knowledge?
If you have a question that's been stumping you and you can't figure out
either how to do something on WordPress or how to do something on social media,
give us a shout out on Twitter and we'll do our best to make a video just for you.
Hope you're having a great one.
Bye, y'all!