INSTAGRAM AND TWITTER THE RISE OF HASHTAGGING
With the rise of selies, quick social media exposure and linking everything via hash tags, the world and indeed the music industry is governed by this sometimes annoying social media craze.
Hash Tagging is common amongst twitter and instagram users and now has the same platorm and connection in facebook. For those that don't know (where have you been for the last 3 plus years), hash tagging is using the # sign during social media posts to link keywords to other related posts and users. By hashtagging #music on twitter or instagram anyone using that app/website can search for keywords and be instantly linked to anything with that word marked (hashtagged).
This is a great wy for extra exposure on Instagram and Twitter primarily as bands, artists, instruments, music, genres and other musical quotes and phrases can be linked to a mass database for others to search and find. By using this correctly, people who normally wouldn't have access to your material or page will be drawn by seeing one or two keywords and at the end of the day, the more people you drag to visit or listen the bigger your potential audience.
Instagram when coupled with short videos of a live performance or a quick demonstration of a technique or song you've learnt or wrote can be hashtagged with the relevant keywords to draw people towards your video.
For example, uploading a 10 second video of yourself playing a small snippet of a solo can be hashtagged with the genre of music, the instrument you're playing, the band or artist who wrote the track (even if it's yourself), social media links, website links, how you recorded the audio, what equipment you normally use, the youtube link to the full solo or track and then just keywords that people search daily such as your gender and unrelated words such as sexy, cool, interesting, groove, etc... as teenagers are bound to search keywords like that on a weekly basis.
Although sexy doesn't really apply to your video or your playing (don't be big headed), it will draw people in searching for random words who see the thumbnail of the video and decide to check out what's going on. By experimenting with keywords and hashtags, you can find the ones which lead the biggest audience to your posts, videos and photos.
Twitter is used the same way except you are limited to your word count so posting the same video or material several times with the space of a day or two with different keywords hashtagged will get a wide range of users looking rather than the usual suspects who search for the same keywords within a week.