Hashtags are turning 10! They’re such a big part of Internet life now, it’s hard for some folks to remember life without them. Others have no idea what it’s all about. If you aren’t familiar with hashtags, I’ll break them down.
Hashtags are basically a filing system for finding certain subjects on social media. Hashtags start with the pound sign # and are usually a word or multiple words with no punctuation.
In many forms of social media such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, these hashtags turn into links that you can click or tap to see other posts on the subject.
For example, I took this photo of snow during the winter and posted it to Instagram with several hashtags.
When viewing the photo on Instagram, you can tap the #snow hashtag because it is an active link.
That will pull up other photos posted on Instagram with the #snow hashtag. It would take some time to look at all of them, as you can see there are over 35,000,000 posts with that hashtag.
I could choose another of the hashtags on that post. #snowledo is a hashtag that became popular when Toledo experienced record snowfall. Tapping that hashtag will show images taken around the Toledo area.
Maybe in the following article you could also indicate how to find a hashtag, that is, where people post. I’d like to follow some conversations, but don’t know how to find hastags for subjects in which I am interested, for example, science, not TV or entertainment.
Try this out http://www.hashtags.org