The #Hashtag: A Powerful Tool for Stipple
By Abby Wilcox
The hashtag is an international symbol. Ironically, it first came into practice on Twitter during the 2009-1010 Iranian election protests. Within a few short years, hashtags saturated the Internet and it’s now a common practice across all social media platforms. Despite this and amidst a handful of spoofs that have been made about the symbol, the hashtag has maintained a stronghold on how we organize our social media lives. But for a good laugh about hashtags, touch the image below to watch Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
Within Stipple, the hashtag can be a valuable tool. If you incorporate the use of the hashtag into your photo captions, they highlight in blue. When you click on them, you’re given the option to “WATCH” the hashtag topics, which are then organized into what Stipple calls “Channels”. In the photo below, when I clicked on the #celebrity hashtag on the JT image, Stipple showed me all of the images hashtagged with #celebrity. I then clicked "WATCH" in the upper righthand corner and the #celebrity hashtag appeared in my Channels list.
The channels, similar to trending topics in Twitter, are found highlighted in red on the left side of your Stipple profile, as seen in the example below on my profile. I am watching a fair amount of channels, and as a content creator, the hashtags and channels help me organize my images. For a deeper look at the channels you are watching, click on the “Explore” pull-down menu.
Also when you Tweet or Facebook an image directly from Stipple, your caption and hashtags automatically appear in the post. This way you can quickly send out your interactive image to your social media outlets without any additional tagging. Give it a try! It’s pretty intuitive! If you have any questions about the Stipple "Channels" feature, don't hesitate to contact our Stipple Support on Twitter.