If you want to keep your content accessible for everyone, remember to use capitalization within your hashtags.
It’s become common to treat social media messaging like texting when it comes to grammar, spelling, format, and punctuation. This makes sense because a lot of audiences are consuming this messaging on their phones. Even though our phones are tiny tech miracles, it still takes an unreasonable amount of time to implement proper writing standards. (I still text in complete sentences, but words are my passion, and doing anything less makes my left eye twitch.)
Some have made the argument that we’ve come full circle and are reverting back to hieroglyphs with emojis, but that’s mostly from people who aren’t interested in allowing language to evolve. And it does evolve, as all living things must, whether we like it or not. Language is either a living, breathing, evolving thing, or it’s dead. There’s no in between.
However, proper capitalization within hashtags has a legitimate purpose, aside from soothing the Old Schoolers among us. For those who are vision impaired, have dyslexia, or other learning differences, accommodation tools tend to relay hashtags without capitalization as one long word.
Why does this matter? (Aside from inclusivity.) Hashtags are used to categorize posts, help users find content they want, and give analytic benchmarks, and in these contexts are not case sensitive.
But capitalizing signals precise messaging. Many examples of what we call “hashtag fails” are available all over social media and while funny, aren’t quite appropriate for posting here.
One that is still talked about to this day was trending on social media when former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher passed away and it was #nowthatcherisdead and it was misinterpreted to mean “Now That Cher Is Dead.”
That kind of misinterpretation could spell trouble for your brand and your business.
Hashtags require thought and planning as part of an overall social media strategy. Reach out to us today to learn how we can elevate yours.
