I will attempt to write on essay for The Minnow Boot Camp discord. This is task #3 for the 'orange' level of this discord. I am supposed to describe 'how to target the proper audience using tags.' First I will breifly go over tags and their purpose.
Social tags are keywords generated by internet users on a platform that are used to describe and categorise an object, concept or idea. On some platforms, other users can also vote on tags that have already been added providing an additional social aspect to social tags. One potential benefit of social tags is that they often provide a quick view into how users perceive something in social media, and can help a consumer quickly locate relevant information about the object. This is one way to conduct social media monitoring. Source
When using nearly any social media platform on the internet you will want to gain attention for your content. Gaining attention to your content can be vital for attracting an audience to your account, that will help motivate you to create more content and depending on your goals, advertiser money. In the case of Steemit, we have a few more strategies made available to us pertaining to how we gain an audience. We are not forced to cover material or create content that will only appease advertisers.
With Steemit we want to attract all types of 'shareholders' of steem power, which is anyone with a Steemit account. You may want to aggressively use tags known whales are using for that one golden upvote or you may want to use 'under-utilized' tags to help increase the chances of your post to be seen by more eyes that will actually want to see the post. Its all about your strategy.
You can find tags at the bottom of a Steemit post. Steemit will only let you use five tags at a time. I've noticed that on outside sites like steepshot you can use more than five tags to help increase the visibility of your post.
This is easy. Typically, when you first load steemit you will have two drop-down menus. These are your tags and how new, promoted, trending, or hot the tag selected is.
Just simply select the Steemit logo in the top left-hand corner to bring you to the pull-down menus for the tag search if they are not made availble to you.
Chances are you have unique content that will justify using 'popular' only occasionally. Tags like: steemit, life, blog, money(lol); may not get your content seen by as many people as you may want unless you have money to post promote using bid bots, in this down market(6/12/2018), I highly suggest not to unless you have it in your personal or buisness budget to do so. Now as a person who has been on the Steemit platform for 7 months, I can tell you I personally enjoy surfing 'new' tags that are relevant to my interests/region. I find there is more genuine posts there by more genuine people. That is just my experience. When posting, I like to use tags that are not 'crowded' with high-value posts, i.e. people who post promote their posts with the same tag over and over again. In my experience as a person who posted garden pictures on Steemit and used to post promote I found my audience increased exponentially as I dominated the 'garden' tag easily with $25 daily in post promotions to bid bots. I have found an article by 
Reason #2: The Breadcrumb Trail
When you effectively categorize your posts with tags, you'll not only increase the likelihood people see those posts - you'll also be laying a lasting trail of breadcrumbs...
If you happen to have gotten a highly-rewarded story on the "Trending" page/category, it may have stayed trending for a couple days. As the number of posts increases, the time a post stays trending on the main site will get shorter & shorter.
However, if your article becomes trending in a category, it will stay trending in that category for MUCH longer. And the narrower the category, with less new posts coming out with the same tags - the longer yet your article will remain at the top of that category trending list.
Its very important to use tags relevant to your content and to research your tags to best understand how you need to promote your content, what kind of audience you want and if you're trying to fish for a whale or minnows. I have been using the 'my-story' tag and 'autobiography' tags for my posts where I chronicle my life story. I'm thinking of incorporating a unique tag like 'dtk-my-story' to better help find my posts in the future, relating to my story posts.
Using tags is all about strategy and how visible you want your posts to be seen. Depending on your strategy, it will determine how you are using tags. I personally do not worry as much with tags since I do not post promote like I once have and my followers have increased exponentially enough to feel comfortable with visibility. Tags are still important and I do carefully select them still but not as worried about the overall tag 'value' as much anymore just the relevancy.
Before I go I wanted to leave this link here on to better help anyone do a tag search as well!
