Many people and businesses are forgetting one important thing when crafting their hashtags.
Hashtags are a great way to expand the reach of your company or brand. By adding hashtags to a post, you make your content discoverable and give other social media users the chance to engage with you on a common interest or theme.
But how can you make hashtags more accessible so that the people you reach can easily interpret them?
Use camel case.
What is camel case? It means capitalizing the first letter of each word of a phrase or a hashtag. So it’s the difference between using #SocialMedia instead of #socialmedia.
It is also used in words such as iPhone.
Its called camel case because capitalizing the words mimics the humps in a camel’s back – a clever visual.
Camel case is an important accessibility requirement for:
- blind people
- people with partial sight
- dyslexic people
Screen readers can’t identify the individual words in a hashtag without camel case. This means your content will be inaccessible to users of screen readers.
To make your hashtags accessible, simply use upper camel case, so #LinkedinTips
Hashtags have the same number of followers whether you use camel case or not.
Camel case improves understanding and readability for everyone. I’m going to start using them and hope you will join me because it should be all about your audience – so make it easier for them to engage with your content with this easy step.