Summer Startup Ch. 06 | Hashtag Search

Hellooooooo Friendssss,

It is Friday afternoon, August 7th, and I want to give a little insight on the hashtag search process and some of the websites that I use to identify high traffic hashtags. But before I get into that, let’s do a recap of this week’s progress for the Creative Revolution startup. Over the week, I continued to develop and hone the proposal for an upcoming web design (potential) client. Now, this is not solidified by any means; hopefully, the proposal yields a solid impression and evolves into a lead. So the proposal has been tweaked highly, and now I am putting a touch of design elements in the proposal to spice it up. Nobody wants to read 12 pages of text without having some pizzazz. Additionally, it has been an expensive week, purchased a domain name, hosting plan, some third party code for an upcoming project that will be discussed in the next few posts. I will get into the details of the hosting plans, and the rest of the particulars in a future post about the upcoming project – could be BIG! Anyways, back to the hashtag search process.

Every morning my brain is in a funk, the creative juices are lacking until my caffeine-induced state starts to fire up my synapses. I give myself that initial morning hour to complete some relatively rudimentary tasks. Scheduling all of my social media messages for the day includes fashioning 6-8 tweets and an Instagram post. However, you cannot just tweet or Instagram a message without doing your due diligence, and that is doing a proper hashtag search. A hashtag search entails finding trending hashtags that are relevant to your post. There is some leeway as some generic hashtags cover broad topics.

I think my favorite hashtag search tool, which sparks ideas in terms you may not have developed is, http://hashtagify.me/. Think of a broad term that you may want to include, and this tool will unearth some relative terms that are trending/popular. It also includes some top influencers if you feel like tagging those individuals in your messages (often recommended). This hashtag search tool gives you a breakdown of monthly and weekly trending rates, whether those hashtags are on the up and up, or they are declining. If you sign up for their free service, you can see usage patterns, as well as unlock a few other features.

If you are looking to target some specific users based on geography, http://trendsmap.com/ is a reasonable search, as it gives you a map based on trending hashtags. With the free version, you can see the latest local and global trends. If you opt to pay for it, you are given an advertisement free version, a filter for a hashtag search, and an increased zoom function. While I use this hashtag search tool, at this time, I cannot justify the $190 price-tag.

The last hashtag search tool is a must-have for social media goers that are not entirely up to date on the definition of certain hashtags. Some of these abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms are incredibly confusing – blame the youth. Perhaps you have been reading your Twitter feed, and you see some trending hashtag that you have no idea what it means. https://tagdef.com/ is a great source for looking up the definition and getting to the root of the hashtag. It is partially crowdsourced as users can upload descriptions, which is helpful, as it seems like new, wonky hashtags are being developed on a daily basis.

For Twitter, I do a hashtag search to find 1-2 relevant hashtags per tweet. For Instagram, I try to use 10-14 hashtags for each image. Take advantage of the tools I have provided and get cracking on hashtagging’!

Derek Brusin

I am the one who likes cupcakes.

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