 Freedom! Today I want to talk to you about hashtags, where they come from and possibly later on getting into how we can use those to market our channels. But first, let me take a selfie. Do you use hashtags? Do you use them strategically to market your channel? Most likely no. Hashtags are pretty much everywhere it seems nowadays. Everywhere from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube, it's almost hard to ignore or to never see a hashtag nowadays. As a YouTube contact creator it's hard to ignore the power of hashtags. Hashtags can expand your content reach, amplify your brand and target specific markets that maybe you're looking for or help you branch out into neighboring markets. This particular video is a brief intro into hashtags for newbies. Most of you know what a hashtag is by now but for those who don't, a hashtag is simply the pound number or hash symbol in front of a word or group of words so that you can carry on a threaded conversation with other people using that hashtag. How hashtags got started. It's hard to trace back to its origin but as far as I can personally tell from my research, it all started back in the days of IRC or internet relay chat. See each IRC channel was a hashtag followed by a word or group of words so that people could find a chat room that fit their interest. So for instance, hashtag cute puppies was nothing but chat about cute puppies and it goes on from there. Later on it went into tweet chats once Twitter came on to the market. This allowed you to have a threaded conversation with other people of similar interests on the fly and they didn't have to follow you so they could discover you and your content very easily. This is pretty much how we use hashtags today. If you're technically inclined, you'll know hashtags as metadata tags and if you're a marketing type, you'll know hashtags as a way to engage your brand and your market together. So this is where we get into the strategy behind hashtags. Unfortunately, I've gone on too long on this video so you'll have to keep an eye out for the next video where we talk about strategies. Till next time, I'm Anthony. Like, subscribe, comments please and thanks so much to this commenter right here for suggesting that topic.