Authors Hashtag Their Way To Social Media Success

Many people who use social media, particularly authors and those in book publishing, are obsessed with hash tags. We put a pound sign in front of any word, name or term that we believe people use to search for information. But what if our assumptions are wrong or limited? Just what gives us the idea these are the hashtags we should use over and over?

Few people give deep thought into which hashtags to use. "Oh, my book is on losing weight, so I will use #diet and #exercise and #loseweight."

But what about the other forms -- in tense and plurality of each of these terms? For instance, you can do diets, dieter, dieters, and dieting. You can use exercising, exerciser, and exercises.

Further, you can expand into related terms: obese, fat, thin, fatty, skinny, or fattest. You can go beyond weight and use broader words such as health, healthy, pretty, sexy, fitness, or fit. You also have workout, gym and hardbody.

But your hash tags can go into other areas as well. For instance, if you blog about how losing weight helped your marriage or career, when you tweet that blog post out you can now use #job #money #career or #love #relationship #marriage. Or maybe your post was hilarious and you can use #humor #funny #laugh. Or, if your post covers celebrities or names in the news, hashtag those names like #kardashian.

When you use hashtags you can't use commas or apostrophes or have spaces between two words but you can combine words. For instance, soul mate can become #soulmate or gun safety becomes #gunsafety.

One way to see which hashtags to use is to see what tags are trending. Another is to look at popular tweeters in your area of expertise and see what they use.

Don't rely on a few hashtags. Rotate many hashtags into your social media and experiment on which tags draw people. Your content is only as good as the hashtags that are used for people to find it.

Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, Media Connect, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2014