Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

62Writing with Hashtags(Or, Don't Be a Hash-hole)

Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon mocked the ridiculous overuse of hashtags with a hilarious sketch last fall on Fallon's late-night show. Their “Twitter Conversation in Real Life” was littered with excessive hashtagging (my favorite part, mocking #LOL: hashtag-el-o-el-o-el-o-el-o-el-o-el-o-el-o-el…). The sketch also skewered what happens when companies—and all of us!—get a little too carried away with tacking a hashtag onto every social media utterance.¹

TechCrunch's Jordan Crook bluntly referred to people who abuse the hashtag as hash-holes, according to Nick Ehrenberg, writing in a post at Top Rank Marketing's blog.²

But you know what? Hashtags don't have to be gratuitous and silly. Hashtags can serve a purpose—they can help tell your story, share your history, and align you with an audience.

In social media, the pound symbol (or hash) turns any word (or group of words) that directly follows it into a searchable link or keyword on Twitter, Vine, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Google+, and Pinterest. A hashtag becomes a handy shortcut, a way for people to categorize, find, and rally around topics and conversations. So if you want to chat with others about the new season of Scandal on Netflix, you might use and search for #Scandal (and #Olitz, if you're among the obsessed!) to follow the conversation.

Twitter is the birthplace of the hashtag. The platform's conversational, casual nature means that Twitter hashtags tend to be ...