Happy New Month 237Showbees! November is here and we’re ready to kick start the new month with another inspirational article! Let me try to guess why you clicked this link, as an artiste, you’re probably wondering how a hashtag can catapult your music career to greater heights! If this is the direction of your thoughts, then you’re a good thinker. However, the word « blow » can be applied to any hustle which has been digitalized. It’s not just music or art, even your business needs to use its own hashtag and other top ones.

Most « Digital Natives » would just read through this write up to add to the existing knowledge they have about hashtags or try to find errors meanwhile the « Digital Naïves » will surely grab a thing or two. I don’t know which mobile network you are using but I’ll just go with the MTN Cameroon. Every MTN Cameroon subscriber knows how to consult their airtime balance and to succeed in this, the code required in words is « Star One Five Five Hash » (*155#).

The hash here is what we’re going to be discussing. The hash being the pound sign becomes a hash tag when you add a word or phrase without leaving any spaces. You don’t need to be a certified ENS Student in order to create a hashtag. The only rules to bare in mind is the no punctuation, no spaces nor special characters. Capitalization in hashtags only ease readability.

A single hashtag can make you blow. It is important to use hashtags because they tend to connect you with your target audience since they will definitely be tweeting or posting using the same hashtags. Many internet users search just by clicking their hashtags of interest, by doing so you as their client or customer can be easily found. For someone looking forward to sign young rappers who drop freestyles on their Instagram daily, they just need to type on the search box #Freestyle and there are one million chances that you might get found.

Also, using more than one hash tag doubles your visibility, thereby drawing attention, organises your posts and tweets as well as promotes it. Lately, there has been trending stories of #Beef between Cameroonian rapper Jovi and Afro pop artistes Tzy Panchak and Stanley Enow. If every post by a Cameroonian has a unique hashtag for this online feud say « #StanChakJoviBeef » and you as a small business, Upcoming artiste, producer or director did a post, be it a freestyle, advert or promotion and you added the hashtag #StanChakJoviBeef , your post will automatically get double visibility because you have tagged it to the existing hashtag that’s trending.

Along the line, Digital naïves always saw hashtags as a way to summarize their posts or make it colorful, well there’s’more to that.

Lastly, hashtags are very delicate, incase you miss a single letter from the already existing hashtags, there are 0% chances your posts will be seen.

Hashtags have made many people blow, for example #237ShowbizMusicCompetition, #BDMA2018, Timaya’s #BamBamChallenge, Cameroonian rapper Ko-c’s #BalanceChallenge which recently awarded its winner 100.000CFA

All in all, as an entertainer, small business, create a unique hashtag making sure it doesn’t exist yet, use it to tag all your posts and tweets. Finally, add some top trending hashtags which are of the same interest of what you do and get found!

Victor Kange

(#NaTengiYesu)