Basic Understanding of Hashtags
Introduction
This article is about explaining how a hashtag helps to organize and index content for social media. I felt compelled to do this because I feel like the younger generation might understand that it is important to use hashtags, but I don’t believe they really understand why and what is happening behind the scenes. Just recently I was at a training, and most of the people were fairly young, at least younger than me, but most did not understand the significance or how a hashtag works. So if you want to know why hashtags are important to use and how they work, this is the article for you.
What is a hashtag?
The hashtag has been around before the telephone was invented. The symbol, “#” was known as a pound. For a very long time, we knew the symbol as a pound and nothing else. Today some people still know it as a pound, but most folks know it as a hashtag, especially when it is associated with social media. So, what does a hashtag do? Really, a hashtag helps to organize or group content on social media or any other site that needs some type of data organization by using a word or words together proceeded by a pound sign (hashtag).
There are many reasons why you would want to use hashtags and how you should use them on different social media sites. However, this is not the article for that. If you need more information, I recommend reading the article entitled, “How to use hashtags in social media.”
What an actual hashtag does.
The main purpose of this article is to understand what the hashtag does. As we mentioned before, a hash tag is nothing more than a keyword. How do these keywords group and organize content? In the most simple way, each time you create some content and associate a hashtag with it, the word with the hashtag (keyword) is being put in one table in a database, and the content that is being associated with it is being placed in another table. This creates between two tables in a database relationship knowns as one to many relationship. This relationship is what helps to index content. By searching for that keyword, in turn that keyword will give you the results of all the content it points to. For example, if you posted three posts to a social media site, and used the hashtag #owner, then every end user who searches for the keyword “owner”, the results will be the posts that are linked to that keyword. Hashtags are important as they help to organize and group content for simpler searching.
References used on this article
https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/how-to-use-hashtags-in-social-media#heading_38454
https://iamyogesh.medium.com/what-is-the-best-approach-to-store-hashtags-in-a-database-caa796d714d4
