Social Media Tip - using @ vs #

​Proper use of "@" vs "#" for Smith Lake AL Advertisers

This tip is primarily for all our advertising businesses in the Smith Lake Alabama area, but is a good tutorial for anyone who is not aware of how the "@" and "#" features work on social media and particularly as it concerns your advertising/marketing perks - FREE advertising for those who utilize. 

Quick descriptions of what each feature does:

"@" (mention) feature - this activates a live link for Facebook/Instagram users to click and go directly to the "@" mentioned business page, and additionally (which is most important for our advertisers) produces a notification to the "@" linked page/user (our marketing team) that you want them to see a post and/or act on a post.

"#" (hashtag) feature - does not link or send a notification to anyone or any page - but is simply a "search" feature for both Facebook and Instagram (& Twitter), and honestly this feature is getting less and less important.

We encourage our Smith Lake advertising businesses to join our main page The Lakeside Life - Smith Lake Alabama, and our Facebook Groups, Smith Lake Community and Smith Lake Small Businesses @smithlakebiz as your company page(s), not just as an individual person; otherwise your company cannot be properly linked/tagged, and your company is not being auto-notified by Facebook (or Instagram) when recommendations for you are being made by our team through our pages, or by members or customers who try to "@" mention/link your company for others to find you quickly.  Not joining as your company page causes others to not easily discover your company with a simple click. Again, if you are not a member of a page as your company page, when an "@" tag for you is attempted, it will show as simply grayed-out/not highlighted indicating Facebook (or Instagram) is not auto-notifying you, so you never know that you were recommended or mentioned in a post or comment and readers of the comment were unable to connect quickly to your business.

In short, if you are one of our print advertising businesses who wish to take advantage of FREE reposts on our social media, please use the "@" (mention) feature - again it activates the link and produces a notification to the linked page/user (i.e our marketing team) so we know to check out your post and repost it on our social media. Remember, the "#" (hashtag) feature does not notify our marketing team; therefore you will miss out on free reposts.  It's so important for businesses not to miss out on FREE social media help - so please simply use "@" mention - it only takes a nanosecond. 

If you have any questions or need help with social media, please connect with us, we're here for you and ready to help.  Remember, for certain levels of advertising, reposting is a complimentary feature of your print package (provided you use the "@" mention feature properly, so use in a caption, comment, or on a photo OR simply send the post to us either via social media or email.

Please do not miss out on our help and assistance. If you need additional social media services, we can connect you with a great team of reputable LOCAL resources for every level - all very affordable. We caution businesses to be very careful of any person(s) who represent themselves as social media or marketing representatives but are actually only targeting your accounts to gain access to and capture your database of followers/customers/connections for personal gain. This can be very damaging to your business.  Sadly this type of parasitic behavior has been going on, and it is unfortunate that we have seen local businesses fall prey to being used and targeted this way. It is not wise to give out passwords to your businesses social media and email accounts too easily without proper research and recommendations.

Just reach out and ask when you have questions, we're here to help by phone or email. Thank you!

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