Over 12 years ago, Chris Messing, founded the immortal ‘Hashtag’ that inadvertently led to it becoming the staple of social media marketing campaigns. 
 
Firstly, strategically placed in tweets, this type of metadata tag is now widely used across all social media platforms, particularly Instagram. However, if you get too #hashtagging happy placing too many in your post/tweet, your precious content could be rendered useless due to it’s unintended ‘spammy’ look! So, why use hashtags? 
 
Placing a hashtag before a word that summarises the nature of your post/tweet will assist in categorising it’s content for your audience to locate and read by being indexed by the social network. 
 
A social media user searching for a specific hashtag will observe various posts/tweets that include the same hashtag, and therefore enables your content to be seen if relevant to the user’s search.  
 
So, it’s always important to research and use trending hashtags applicable to your content. 
However, this man-made innovation of genius can sometimes cause ‘hashtag havoc’ and find itself shamefully walking down the street of humiliation. 
 
A prime example falls on the head of poor Susan Boyle. Whilst promoting her new album, her PR team made the ultimate blunder by incorrectly creating a hashtag. Instead of correctly saying #SusanAlbumParty”, the result was somewhat different: #Susananalbumparty, which inevitably led to Susan going viral – and for all the wrong reasons! 
 
Another was posted by attendees to a local 4N networking event at Villa Park. It was an event for Area leaders so they chose this #4NAL - Oh dear! 
If we were to offer one word of advice when creating your unique hashtag, it would be read it over and over again and look at its appearance to ensure you don’t go viral for all the wrong reasons! 
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