I have to admit something. I hate hashtags. I find them incredibly annoying. First, it’s the fact that the person has
finished what they’re saying, yet they’re still repeating words from their
statement, which I find a bit odd. Then
there’s the motivation behind it. It’s a
blatant call to “look at me!” I’ve been
really enjoying Jimmy Fallon’s parodies of hashtags on Late Night, and I have
several times placed up parody hashtags as a way to make fun of them.
However, in the world of promoting your work, and by
extension yourself, you have to do it. I
have a wonderful social media person helping me out with Relic Worlds right now
named Tricia. She has been showing me
the value of these hashtags. By posting
my images and various activities, she’s shown me how to get attention to my
projects. The most important aspect of
these posts has been the hashtags. The
reason is because it connects the post to other people who have used hashtags
on their posts. So when someone clicks
on their hashtag, they see my post, and vice versa.
One problem with this is that, with so many people
marketing themselves, or just going “look at me!” there are a lot of hashtags that
do not relate to what they’re saying.
For instance, you’ll have a picture of a tank and put #scifi, then when
you click on it you’ll see someone at the beach with that hashtag; someone who’s
just trying to get people to look at her.
It has nothing to do with science fiction.
Posts like this have really devalued the hashtag, and it
makes me wonder how much longer this craze will last. I feel as though it’s a fad, but I also felt
that way about Twitter, so what do I know?
For now, I guess I’ll be doing it myself, but I feel quite dirty.
#writing #author #selfpublishing #Jimmyfallon #scifi #beachbum
#hashtags #sellout #Ifeelsodirty
No comments:
Post a Comment