Hashtag walls
A hashtag wall for everything worth keeping.
A hashtag wall is the only kind of social media wall where you are not the author. That is what makes it persuasive, and it is also the whole source of its difficulty — collection is metered, permission is murky, and the queue is public. Everything on it is user-generated content, with all the value and all the obligations that carries.
Launch night for Salt & Ember’s Northgate room. Six months of naming, identity and photography — and one very good service.
The sharing menu Fieldnote helped us name and shoot. Booked out three weekends running. #SaltAndEmber
Open kitchens are a photographer’s nightmare and a brand’s best asset. Salt & Ember, second site, now open.
Half the studio, one table, four brands in flight. This is what a Tuesday looks like. ↓
12:41Making things that make things: the Meridian Works brand film
Salt & Ember Northgate, an hour before doors. The brass screens were the one detail we argued for, and we’d argue for them again.
Our new admissions campaign goes live today. Thanks to the Fieldnote team for making the place look the way it actually feels.
Behind every part we make is a drawing somebody checked twice. New brand film with Fieldnote next month.
Our entire process, on three sticky notes. Everything else is negotiable.
How collection really works
This is the section most hashtag wall pages skip, and it is the one that decides whether your campaign plan is realistic.
Platforms meter hashtag search
Instagram in particular caps how many distinct tags an application may track in a rolling window. One campaign tag is comfortable; a list of twenty is not a plan.
A tag has to be unusual to be useful
Generic tags return other people's content and a moderation nightmare. Something specific to the campaign is both easier to collect and easier to approve.
Not every network offers it equally
Tag-based collection is well supported on some networks, restricted on others, and effectively closed on the ones that have monetised search. Check before you print the tag on anything.
Public does not mean licensed
Someone tagging your campaign is not the same as granting you rights to use their photograph in advertising. Ask, and keep the reply.
Why a hashtag wall must be moderated
The value of a hashtag wall is that strangers made the content. The risk of a hashtag wall is exactly the same sentence.
- Manual approval is the default, and for a public campaign it should stay that way
- Anyone can use your tag, including people who dislike you and people advertising something unrelated
- Hashtag moderation mode queues tagged posts for review rather than publishing them, which is the whole point of the mode
- Removing a post on request should take one click and no discussion
Getting the tag used at all
The most common hashtag wall failure is not a bad post reaching the screen. It is a wall with nine posts on it, because nobody knew the tag existed.
- Put the tag where the phone already is — on the table, on the badge, on the screen itself, not only in an email
- Give people a reason: a prize, a feature on the wall, or simply seeing themselves appear
- Seed it with your own posts so the wall demonstrates what it is for
- Say the tag out loud from a stage once; it outperforms every printed mention
Questions
Fewer than you would like, and the limit is the platform's rather than ours — Instagram caps distinct tags per application in a rolling window. Design the campaign around one strong tag rather than a list.
Related
Build the wall before you need it.
Set it up on the free plan, seed it, and have it working long before anyone is watching the screen.
Start free