Is everyone familiar with the hashtag?

It looks like this: #

If you are a big social media fan, first of all, be sure to follow and like your local Used.ca site, and secondly, you have probably seen and used a hashtag on many occasions that you require little explanation.

For others, a hashtag may be something new.

Hashtags are used to emphasise certain words in a sentence and are used mainly on social media. For instance, here at Used.ca, we consistently use the hashtags #ShouldaUsedVictoria or #ShouldaUsedPEI to tag photographs of discarded items we think should have been posted to a buy and sell site!

We also held a contest to win prizes worth $1,000. When we tweet about or share this contest, called Post to WIN, we use the hashtag #PostToWIN.

Why Use a Hashtag?

By using a hashtag, people can find our social media posts more easily. They can click on the hashtag and see all the posts that have that hashtag attached. They can also search a specific hashtag to find conversations they want to be a part of.

Let’s say you are new to Twitter, you love DIY and you want to find others to make conversation with and follow on the topic of DIY. You could search #DIY and all the posts with that hashtag attached would appear. The hashtag can make searching easier, which leads me to my next point.

Why Am I Telling You This?

I’ll admit that yes I am an #overzealoushashtaguser and I do like to use #morehashtagsthannecessary but there is a purpose to this blog!

You can now use hashtags on your local Used.ca site.

This is a new feature recently introduced that will make our buy and sell sites even easier to use.

Selling a bike? Hashtag it #bike. Looking for a bike? Search for #bike. Simple. And fun #ifyoulovehashtags.

If an ad has a hashtag, you can click on this hashtag, and all other ads with the same hashtag will appear.

A way to make the most of this new feature is to post your item as you would do usually and then use hashtags to describe the item with other words users might be searching for.

For example, that bike you are selling. Write the ad and then include the hashtags #bike #bicycle #mountainbike #kidsbike #kidsbicycle at the end of your post, whatever you think will describe the bike. This way your ad will come up when users search any of these hashtagged words.

Using hashtags when you post ads will increase the number of people who see your ad. It is a very simple way of being descriptive without having to write reams of information.

#tryitseeandbeamazed