This document provides a survey of hashtags which can be used to identify resources on social media and other services based on hashtags used to identify the dance style.
You want information about your side to be found. In particular you want your videos to be viewed as you know that YouTube videos can very popular.
Hashtags can held people discover new resources by clicking on a hashtag to see related resources. An example, from the “Morris and Sword Dancing at Warwick Folk Festival – interview by Hashu Mohammed” YouTube video, is shown.
But it’s probably less well known that many YouTube videos are shown by automated recommendations: the next video shown automatically is likely to be similar to the one you have chosen to watch. And such automated recommendations are selected by a variety of reasons including a hashtag.
People who have chosen to watch a video about a longsword dance, a Border morris side or an Appalachian clog dance might like to watch similar videos. So if a YouTube video has a hashtag for the dance style that may help to inform the YouTube algorithms.
Ideally a hashtag will be sufficiently focussed to cover the dance style (an tag of ”#Appalachian”, for example, would be likely to include videos of the Appalachian mountains), be short enough to be memorable and would work across a range of services. The following table gives possibly hashtags which could be used for the dance styles list in the Morris Federation’s “What is Morris Dancing?” page.
Details of the survey are given below. Note the number of results for the search engines were reported on 19 January 2024 (and these figures are liable to change).
| Hashtag | Web search results (no. of hits) | Results (media) |
|---|---|---|
| #AppalachianClog | Google (43) – Bing (20) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #BorderMorrisDance | Google (611) – Bing (828) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #BorderMorris | Google (2,400) – Bing (3,800) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #ClogStep | Google (57) – Bing (1,480) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #CotswoldMorrisDance | Google (31) – Bing (8,630) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #CotswoldMorris | Google (1,100) – Bing (51,500) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #GarlandDance | Google (136) – Bing (576) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #LongswordDance | Google (186) – Bing (1,040) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #MollyDance | Google (616) – Bing (2,610) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #NorthwestMorrisDance | Google (32) – Bing (3,240) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #NorthwestMorris | Google (135) – Bing (169,000) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #RapperSwordDance | Google (275) – Bing (44,600) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #RapperSword | Google (427) – Bing (42,300) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| In addition here are details for some generic terms | ||
| #morrisdance | Google (659,000) – Bing (5,100) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #morrisdancing | Google (9,130) – Bing (6,060) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #morrisdancers | Google (1,790)- Bing (6,810) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| #morris | Google (865,000,000) – Bing (21,900,000) | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
| template | Google – Bing | [YouTube] – [Instagram] – [TikTok] – [Bluesky] |
Note this data was last updated on Sunday 25 February 2024.
The hashtags will be of particular interest to those who have videos on YouTube, TikTok or other video-sharing platforms. We are publishing a series of professionally made short videos from January-May 2024 which will feature a variety of dance styles. Each video will include hashtags for the dance styles shown in the videos. If you would like videos of your side to be (potentially) included we suggest you add relevant hashtags for your videos.
Document published: 25 Feb 2024
Updated: 10 Dec 2024 (added details for Bluesky)
This document is available with a Creative Commons Sharealike (CC-BY) licence. In brief, this means you can copy and make changes to this document provided you give acknowledgements to the author/publisher. A suggested wording for acknowledgements is:
This document is based on the "Survey of Hashtags for Dance Styles" document by Brian Kelly, Comms and IT volunteer with the Morris Federation.
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