You get back what you put out into the world.

I was talking about this with my 9 year old son recently - perhaps influenced by the latest James Wedmore podcast with Brandon Lucero. We had a great discussion about how when the boys are mopey, it can make me feel mopey. When they’re happy (usually) mommy’s happy. 

In business, on social media, when speaking in public - this is also true. As an authority in your space, you are the thermometer for the "room," or the online platform that they’re choosing to interact with you on.

If you put out negativity, boring or doomsday content, you’re going to get negativity, and/or simply hear crickets (ie no response) back! If you put out positive, value driven content - people are going to have a positive reaction - and keep coming back!

Taking another step deeper into this, if you want engagement on your social media, you've got to give engagement. What is engagement? Simply likes, comments, shares and saves...

Did you ever see the hashtag video with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake? (If you haven’t seen it, watch it here.) In the video from the Late Night Show, the guys were hilariously poking fun at the over-use of hashtags, but I’m here to tell you that hashtags are actually a very useful tool in your social media toolbox.

In today's post, I’ll go over what hashtags are exactly, and how to go about using them on social media.

A hashtag is simply the pound sign (#) followed by a keyword or phrase, no spaces. Like #greensmoothies or #farmersmarkets. They are used as a way to label or organize your posts into categories of interest to make them easier for people to find on each platform. 

Staying with the food theme, let's say I wanted to make a smoothie. I might hop over to Pinterest or Instagram to search #smoothierecipes. This would return to me a never-ending result of all the posts tagged with #smoothierecipes. If you're a blogger who blogs about smoothies -...