Table of contents

  1. Introduction to social media
  2. Writing for social media
  3. Personality and tone of voice
  4. Structuring a tweet
  5. Structuring a Twitter thread
  6. House style for the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) social media
  7. Tagging official accounts
  8. Hashtags
  9. Images for social media
  10. Alt text and accessibility
  11. Other support for creating social media content

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Hashtags

Using hashtags on Twitter and Facebook helps us engage with wider conversations and increase our exposure. We use hashtags on relevant awareness days (for example, #InternationalWomensDay) and for national and international trending topics.

Important points for using hashtags

  • Check for an existing hashtag from official sites, or search on social media channels to see if there was one last year to predict what it might be this year.
  • Place hashtags at the end of the tweet, and after any links, to avoid disrupting the reading.
  • Use “camel case” (that is, capitalise each word like #CamelCase) – this makes it easier to read and avoids miscommunications.
  • Don’t include punctuation such as hyphens or apostrophes (for example, write #COVID19).