In this episode of the Speak PR podcast, host Jim James, an entrepreneur and PR agency founder, explains the purpose, history, and strategic use of hashtags for business owners and content marketers. He traces hashtags back to Chris Messina’s 2007 proposal for Twitter as a way to index short‑form content, then shows how they have spread to Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and other platforms. Jim outlines practical dos and don’ts: keep hashtags short, memorable, public, and balanced between broad relevance and niche specificity; use platform‑appropriate quantities (1‑2 on Twitter, 5‑10 on Instagram); and maintain consistent brand tags (e.g., #SpeakPR, #GetNoticed). He reviews tools for hashtag research and social listening—RightTag, Hashtagify, Hootsuite, Flix—detailing their pricing, data‑point coverage, and how they reveal trends, retweets, and exposure metrics. Real‑world examples such as #love (the most used tag), #LoveMyBeagle, Black Lives Matter, and the Red Cross COVID Heroes campaign illustrate the power of hashtags to unite audiences and drive campaigns. Jim likens hashtags to library classification systems, emphasizing that content creation is only 20 % of content marketing; the remaining 80 % involves making content discoverable through effective indexing. He concludes with a call to adopt thoughtful hashtag strategies to improve visibility and engagement.
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Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and this is a podcast for business owners who would like to unlock the value in their business with effective communications. I've been an entrepreneur myself for over 25 years and also run an international public relations agency called EastWest PR. Today I'm going to talk about the hashtag, and I'm doing that because I was inspired by a conversation with Colin Miles yesterday at Zilliqa, talking about how hashtags are used to index content, and realising that I've been publishing content myself online and for clients without really understanding the nature of hashtags. This podcast is going to dive into some of the dos and don'ts about hashtags, how you can use them, and how you probably shouldn't use hashtags. So the hashtag is the pound symbol on your keyboard. It's also called an octothorpe, apparently, and it was initially used to mark numbers. And they were first used as hashtags in the summer of 2007 by someone called Chris Messina. And it was put forward as a way to start to index the growing amount of content that was flowing into Twitter without really any kind of catalog system. So Chris Messina went into Twitter's office and proposed the use of the pound symbol, I guess a generally available symbol. And in America, of course, this octothorpe is on the phone as well as a pound sign. So the idea was, because Twitter only allows so few characters that instead of asking people to give some kind of explanation or introduction, this would be like a shortcode or a shortcut to create an index for people that are looking to post information, to let people know, if you like, which filing area it should be, and also for people following certain topics to kind of sort through the vast volume of content. As we know, that has only got larger. Hashtags can be seen as a way to connect the growing volume of content with specific topics or people or themes or conversations. And of course, hashtags are no longer only on Twitter. They're being used across Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn since 2018, and YouTube, because the simplicity of the pound symbol means that it can be used across languages, across platforms. It's good for both desktop and mobile, but also it works. Now, just thinking about a few tips and tools, I'm not necessarily an expert, but I've been doing some some looking and some reading. I want to share some of those thoughts and ideas. Now, the hashtag needs to be a hashtag and then the topic or the word without a space between the hashtag and the actual word that we're writing, or one or two words that we might be writing. The accounts that we're using Social media accounts have got to be public so that the content can be seen. Otherwise, people wouldn't be able to see the content anyway. The best hashtags are relatively short and easy to remember, and I'm going to tell you which is the number one hashtag of all time in a moment. But also, we need to try and use relevant but also specific hashtags, and this is where we move into the, oh, that's obvious, to the, that's a bit of a science, uh, part of hashtags. Because if a hashtag is too general, then of course you're putting your content into really a very large pool of information already. But if it's too specific, the hashtag, or too custom, then there isn't anybody following it. And therefore it's not going to appear on anybody's feed. So we have to try and find this compromise, and there are tools for doing that. So hashtags can be used to connect an issue, for example, that is beyond the brand that you work for. So, and it could be a way to bring people together. So obviously a good example of that is Recently, the Black Lives Matter hashtag, which has really united people and sort of transcended platforms and geographies to unite people around one social cause. And I mentioned also the Red Cross COVID Heroes campaign that was run with Zilliqa in Singapore, and that was used as a rallying call for raising money for the Red Cross in Singapore worked very effectively. So the hashtag can be really a very powerful but simple way of validating and contextualizing the information that we're going to be sharing. And that information could be video, it could be an infographic, it could be text, it could be a long form, it could be a podcast. Now I said I was going to mention the most popular, and the most popular hashtag of all time is love, #love, and that has 1.7 billion posts attached to it apparently, which actually doesn't seem that much considering how many people are using hashtags. But of course, if you use the hashtag love, then there's so much content out there that your piece of content would be one of 1.7 billion pieces of content. So we need to find hashtags that are relevant enough to our topics, but broad enough to be relevant to an audience. And this is obviously part of the knack of it. You could have something instead like #lovesickatsea, which could be more specific. I looked up #lovemybeagle for my hashtag to be even more. Now I looked at A site called Right Tag, and I looked at #LoveMyBeagle because Binky's sitting with me now. #LoveMyBeagle, and I was shown that there are four unique tweets per hour on #LoveMyBeagle, and the hashtag exposure is 167. So the The RightTag showed me also a retweet which could boost the appeal of my #LoveMyBeagle hashtag. Now, RightTag is one of a number of platforms that can help us to identify just how powerful the hashtag that we'd like to use is going to be. RightTag.com is a $54 a month bundle. And there's another one called hashtagify.me, and that's, uh, $29 a month for your personal account, $86 for your business account, and $311 for your enterprise account. Now that sounds like quite a lot of money. Of course, these services are tracking trending hashtags. They're tracking what influencers are posting with certain hashtags. And they're making recommendations based on these trends and your own content for your own hashtags. Now they've got trackers and they do it by the number of data points. So the more expensive programs are tracking more data points. The basic one is tracking 5,000 data points, for example, and they're analyzing data on Twitter for a particular given hashtag and also for the people that are using those hashtags. They're able to analyze different interactions as well with that hashtag. So you can see not only which hashtag is trending, but which ones are retweeted, for example. So I mentioned that I tried just the free version there for my #LoveMyBeagle hashtag. And if I was selling, for example, pet food, or if I was selling something like cosmetics, a hashtag generator would help me to identify certain trends and certain currents of information. And I could use the hashtags that are trending to really position my content within the current conversation that's taking place online. So a little bit, well, that's why it's called social listening, of course. Social listening tools like Hootsuite are helping us to understand the narrative that's taking place online before we dive in and start saying things that might be irrelevant. Now, LinkedIn, uh, recently, 2018, allowed hashtags. They weren't doing that before, nor was Facebook. The number one hashtag on, on LinkedIn is innovation with 38,600,000 usage. Management is 36 million. Digital marketing, 27.5 million. So you can imagine that if you're doing a hashtag on your LinkedIn post for innovation, yours is one of 38 million pieces of content out there, which means that it's going to get lost. So One of the ways that we can start to look at our hashtags is to find one or two that are resonating for our business and for the industry or for the particular trend. We can use 1 to 2 hashtags on Twitter, is recommended, and Instagram 5 to 10, but If we keep chopping and changing our hashtags, then our content itself is not being indexed. And what we want to do, of course, is to hashtag our content in a consistent way over time. So I've started the Speak PR. I've done a hashtag Speak PR. I've also started hashtag Get Noticed so that all the podcasts and the email newsletters and the audiograms on YouTube start to be collated under this #SpeakPR hashtag and #GetNoticed hashtag. So if we think about hashtags as a way to both index our content, but also to be able to have our content participate or be found by people who are doing social listening, it's important to analyze using these tools like Hashtagify, There's another called Flix that will give us the insight. Now, if it all sounds like too much work, it's possible, of course, not to put any hashtags. But it does seem as though if we don't use hashtags, our content really is going to be uneasy for people to find. A bit like putting books in the library. I was a librarian when I was in North Carolina at Chapel Hill University, and we had the Library of Congress. Book numbers, and of course in England we've got the Dewey Decimal System. And the hashtag system is in a way a very primitive equivalent to the Library of Congress or the Dewey Decimal System, in that it's trying to make sense and order of a great volume of information. And just as we would want our book on the shelf to have a Dewey Decimal Number, We really want our podcast or our article or our tweet to also be indexed. But also, we'd like our books to be somewhere near the the well-read section where the popular books are, rather than an outlier somewhere at the back of the library on the top floor. So using hashtags, something that I'm learning about myself. I'm interested to work with the Zilliqa. People to see how we can boost our own hashtags. But I should be spending more time learning about how I should be indexing my content, because content creation is only part of the job. And one statistic suggests that content marketing is 20% content generation and 80% marketing. And hashtags definitely fall within that 80%. So with that, a short podcast today because it's a relatively simple topic but one that becomes more and more complex. But as it's a Friday, I feel probably we don't need to go complex, but we do need to just think about what we're saying and how it can be seen and also what we're watching for. So with that note, I wish you a A good weekend, the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating and help others to find your information with some accurate and some concise hashtags.
