How Hashtags Work on Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr, and Flickr

A hashtag is the wonder of the past decade. It was born to address the need to organize and make sense of the overwhelming social media buzz. Thanks to active and creative user adoption, hashtag support has been added to most popular social media platforms.

This article shows how different social media sites make use of hashtags. Most importantly, it shares some insight into how you can make the most effective use of hashtags for your brand.

Twitter

Twitter hashtags don't support special characters like +, !, $, %, -, ^, &, *, etc. They do support letters, numbers and _ (underscore).

There are no hashtag limits (length, number) as long as you keep your message within 140 characters (which is already limiting in itself).

While Twitter hashtags are reported to increase engagement, the most efficient way to use them is through hosting and participating in Twitter chats. Here's a detailed tutorial on hosting a Twitter chat.

Event hashtags (conferences, festivals, etc.) also work very well on Twitter. You don't need to actually be in an event to network with people through the official hashtag. Event organizers usually market the official hashtag very well, which means additional exposure for you if you use it.

Twitter search results are ranked by most popular. You can switch to "All" results,  which are filtered by date.

Useful Twitter Hashtag Tools:

• Hashtagify tracks trending hashtags and shows "related" hashtags for any base terms you provide.
• TwChat lets you discover, participate in, and easily host Twitter chats. It's also a useful tool for monitoring and archiving any hashtag streams. Read More...