It’s not a pound sign, nor the symbol for number. It is now officially known as the hashtag. Children born after the year 2007 don’t have any idea of the old connotations.

Proving my point is a story of my daughter who was in first grade last year. The teacher was doing a math lesson and wrote “# of cookies” on the Smartboard. Kyra quickly raised her hand to ask, “Mrs. K, what does hashtag of cookies mean?”

Understanding what, why and how to use hashtags is an important aspect of telling your school’s story. With every presentation I do with districts across the Midwest, I get at least one question pertaining to this mysterious little symbol. So let’s break down some FAQ when it comes to hashtags.

What is a hashtag?

Simply put, a hashtag is an easy way for people to search for tweets or posts that have a common topic. In this case, that topic is your school.

Hashtags consist of the # symbol followed by letters or numbers. No spaces can be used, nor symbols. Capital letters do not matter.

So if you happen to love NCAA basketball, you could follow #NCAAhoops. That could also be typed as #ncaahoops. If you were to type in #ncaa hoops with the space, then that will not work. The only item recognizes will be #ncaa, so you may get stories on football or gymnastics that pertain to NCAA.

You can get in the conversation by utilizing the hashtag in your post, or you can simply read other posts using that hashtag. Many users of Twitter or Instagram, where a hashtag search works the best, use hashtags to consume or find information. They never really use the hashtag themselves. Hashtags work the best on Twitter and Instagram, but they can function on Facebook and even in internet browser searches.

Why do we need a hashtag for our school?

Hashtags allow everyone to become a storyteller for your school. At any given moment, there are hundreds of things happening inside of your district. If you want a chance for all of those things to shine through, you need a hashtag that everyone uses on social media!

It’s fun to find and then share photos and videos that you locate by doing a hashtag search. If you repost photos on your own school page, you should always give a thank you to the originator of the content. Retweeting is another option to simply share the post on your Twitter feed.

Is there such a thing as too many hashtags?

Yes. There is such a thing as too many hashtags for your school.

If you end up asking yourself which school hashtag you should use on a given post, then you have too many. I think it is very important to establish one primary hashtag for your district first. Promote it every chance you get so that you can get your channels flooded, like the Fall Creek School District does with their use of #GoCrickets.

Once you have one that is well known, you can possibly add separate hashtags to differentiate between schools, sports, or other special interests. Other hashtags will be used by your community, but before you start utilizing them in school district posts, you’ll really want to make sure you want to promote them.

What happens when someone uses the hashtag in a negative way?

When you utilize a hashtag for your district, it is of course a possibility that someone could use it in a negative way. A neighboring school rival starts bashing your basketball team. Or an angry parent takes to social media to gain attention on a complaint they have with the school.

Can it happen? Yes. Social media provides a stage for positive and negative things for others to say about your district. However, the more people use your hashtag to celebrate all of the positives about the school, the less likely people are going to take notice of the negative comments.

Please don’t let the possibility of something negative showing up with your school hashtag deter you from promoting all of the awesome stuff that is happening. People will say not-so-great things about your district with or without your school hashtag. Consider it a bonus that you can actually see it. Knowledge is power, and you may be able to share the truth behind a complaint or bring people in to discuss issues in person.

So What’s Your Hashtag?

OK – you are now a hashtag expert. So what is your school hashtag? Shout it out below!