Episode 174 – Keep or Banish Hashtags? Recording of Radio Spot on Technology Revolution: The Future of Now with Bonnie D. Graham

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Time Stamped Show Notes:

03:18 – A quote from SELLER’S DIGITAL

Hashtags aren’t as cool as they once were, social media, like twitter and Instagram, thrived on hashtags to promote content and connect followers with brands, but hashtags are quickly losing favor on social media.

03:36 – The Buzz #2 from Sprout Social

It’s been 13 years, I didn’t know that since the founding of the hashtag and marketers are now questioning if hashtags are still relevant. When they ask their community on Instagram about hashtags, get this, 66 % said hashtags are still a key part of their social strategies, but 34 % said we’re over those.

04:02 – The Buzz #3 from Earl Sweatshirt

“Everyone’s like sheep on social media; like, one person starts making noise, and everyone’s like, ‘Hey, yeah!’ and then you got a whole bunch of people making noise at you.” (Earl Sweatshirt, American rapper, songwriter, record producer)

04:26 – Buzz #4 is from R I P L

They say don’t use only hashtags with two million tags. Why one of the most popular hashtags on Instagram is hashtag, fashion, has 860 million tags. Tagging your post with this hashtag will ensure it gets lost in the masses.

05:46 – Let’s get to know Mike Grehan

He started online back in 1995.
He has written so much about online marketing, about digital marketing, that people often say Mike’s been very good at predicting.

07-33 – Let’s get to know Crispin Sheridan

He is the Vice President of organic search optimization at SAP, based in Miami Beach.
He said that “Social media is a very important factor of organic search optimization.”

10:42 – Let’s get to know Isabella Wang

Isabella Wang is a digital strategist working as the CEO at a company called Creative House. We are a digital company to help clients with digital transformation strategies from website development, social strategy to lead generation, and we really focus on the big picture to help companies & customers to transform their business model in a fast-changing world with strategic marketing.

14:48 – Let’s get to know Janet E Johnson

Janet has so many years of experience with online marketing. She started online as a hobby by selling items on Ebay in 1998 and turned that into a full time business.
Janet’s says that hashtags are a part when you’re doing organic posting, but hashtags aren’t a big part of the advertising world.

19:47 – Opening Quotes

They asked their guests to send in fun quotes from fictional characters movie or tv and song lyrics.
Mike say’s that “The problem that we have here is not just the noise, but, it’s the abusive tags these hashtags that people use.”
Crispin said “luggage it’s becoming baggage hashtags are becoming baggage and do we really need them?
Isabella pressing us to think about the power of clarity- how we use hashtags and what does it mean to use hashtags. It’s just to follow another trend or you just want to boost your ads? So, all these are are engaged with our clarity and our power to think.
Janet’s says “We have to just learn from it, social media changes every single day of our life and there’s nothing we can do to change that. So, we need to just embrace it and move along with the changes in a meta way.

35:57 – Mike Grehan Prediction

Prediction #3, Mike said that you start and connect with your family first and they connect with you and then you connect with their friends and their friends and then that’s the way it goes. So, the first layer of that actually becomes this network of trust.
You start with that first layer of trust and then you build on that and then you can use hashtags that are connected to you and your family and your interests.

39:41 – Crispin Sheridan Prediction “ The idea of luggage and baggage.”

The idea of luggage and baggage is really important and and the idea of DNA. It gets to the point of authenticity and trust and reliability and this is where we have to really deal with the issue of anonymity
in social media.
Crispin’s prediction-will hashtags will go the way of email folders (gulp) we will no longer have to manually tag our content in this way. Better algorithms and the profile of the writer will play the role of getting found if and when it’s appropriate.

45:45 – Isabella’s Prediction on Hashtags – Prediction #2

The term Social Media will fade and the definition of social media will also change as it no longer refers to any single platform but a virtual ecosystem where we will live and breathe.
All those hashtags helps with Algorithm, the AI, all these kind of mislead us to properly using it and it’s no longer helping us in the way that we wanted to.
The shifting with this matter in the future. It’s also changing our expectation from a 2 dimensional internet to a 3d dimensional burst for us to create customer engagement or to deal with our community.

48:37 – Janet’s Prediction on Hashtags

Janet predicts something will come along that replaces the hashtag in the next few years.
Janet thinks that people are not using hashtags in the way that they used to be used and and even some marketers don’t even know what they’re doing or how they should be posting the hashtags, as well.

51:31 – Mike Graham brought up a good point that what he feels will replace hashtags.

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