How to Use Hashtags in Your Social Media Marketing
Hashtags are a great way to extend the reach of your social media posts and connect with new audiences. They can stimulate conversation, boost visibility of a promotion or connect you with a community that shares your values.
Using hashtags strategically can increase your audience reach, improve SEO, target a specific group of people and create a tight-knit community around your brand. Here are some tips on How to Use Hashtags in Your Social Media Marketing.
Identify Your Target Audience
Hashtags sort the plethora of content on social media into categories, making it easier for users to find what they’re looking for. This tool can also help you connect with new people, even potential customers, when used properly.
The key is to identify your target audience and use hashtags that are relevant to what you’re posting. If you’re posting about cats, using #cats or #kittens is more likely to increase your reach. Similarly, if you’re running a promotion for your business, creating a hashtag around the campaign can make it easier to track the results and measure the success of your marketing efforts.
If you’re unsure of the best hashtags to use, try searching for popular ones that relate to your industry or niche. Additionally, check out the hashtags being used by your competitors and influencers. Using a few of the same hashtags as them can help you boost your visibility.
Keep in mind that different platforms have different rules for using hashtags. For example, Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags with a post, but using too many could hurt your reach by appearing spammy and obscuring the description of your posts. Also, consider adding your hashtags in a comment rather than the post itself since the hashtag search feature lists posts chronologically and waiting to add them will decrease their effectiveness.
Research Popular Hashtags
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how many hashtags you should use in your social media posts. Instead, it’s best to follow platform-specific hashtag best practices and experiment to determine what works best for your business.
To start, take a look at the existing hashtags that are already popular for your industry. Doing this can help you identify potential new content ideas. For example, if you’re interested in increasing your share of voice in the #naturalskincare hashtag, you can use the search results page’s Top tab to see what other brands have been using it to drive engagement. This can give you some great inspiration for how to optimize your own post.
You can also do this research on any hashtag that you’re considering for a future campaign. You can do this by searching the hashtag or even typing a few letters into the search bar on your Instagram app. Most platforms will automatically suggest related hashtags that have been used previously by other businesses in your industry.
You can also use this method to find niche hashtags that are not as crowded, meaning you might have more success connecting with your audience with these more specific tags. This type of branded hashtag can be a great way for small businesses to reach out to passionate communities of people. For instance, Myles Apparel uses the #Donner hashtag to connect with their outdoors-oriented customers in Donner Summit, California.
Create Your Own Hashtags
Creating a hashtag for your business is a great way to get more traction from your social media campaigns. Hashtags allow you to build a community, promote events and communicate with your audience in a creative way. However, before you start brainstorming and constructing clever phrases, determine the goals and aims of your campaign. Hashtags should be tied in with the overall objectives of your marketing strategy, and they can be used across networks to ensure your message is getting to the right people.
Whether you choose to create your own hashtag or borrow from popular trends, be sure to test it out with people outside of the company before making it official. A good test is to ask if the hashtag is easy to remember and makes sense. A funny play on words or a catchy phrase that entices conversation will likely be more memorable than something that is not.
Finally, make sure the hashtag you are choosing is not being used by a competing brand. If it is, you may want to consider a different version of the hashtag (i.e. #GetTogetherAlready for Tostitos). Sprout has an awesome tool that allows you to monitor the popularity of your hashtag and how often it appears in Tweets, Instagram posts and Facebook updates.
Hashtags should be short and easy to read. Capital letters are dropped from hashtags, so the more readable and concise it is, the better. Also, keep in mind that users can follow certain hashtags and receive an automated stream of posts tagged with those specific keywords.
Use Hashtags Effectively
Hashtags can help you categorize your content, follow trends and engage with a community. They can also propel your content to the top of a search, increasing your reach and engagement on social media platforms. However, it’s important to use hashtags effectively, so that they add value and help you grow your audience rather than alienating them.
Keep in mind that each platform has different best practices when it comes to using hashtags. For instance, some platforms limit the number of hashtags you can use on a post and others place posts with hashtags at the bottom of a caption or description (for example, Instagram).
It’s also important to make sure your hashtags are relevant to your content and on-brand for your business. Choosing a hashtag that is too long, unclear or obscure won’t get you the results you want. Similarly, creating a hashtag that is related to a negative or controversial topic can damage your reputation. A famous example of this was when DiGiorno Pizza jumped on the trending #WhyIStayed hashtag in 2014, not realizing that it was being used to discuss domestic abuse.
Also, make sure you use uppercase letters when creating a hashtag, as it makes them easier to read for users with dyslexia and other cognitive disabilities. Hashtags are also best used sparingly, with only one or two included in each post on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Overusing them can actually detract from engagement.
You can also purchase social media accounts, such as Facebook accounts, LinkedIn accounts, Twitter accounts, and YouTube accounts, for your social media marketing.
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