14 min read
Social media marketing is the new normal in the contemporary business world to promote your marketing campaigns and get solid leads and conversions. Digital marketers often come across terms such as search engine optimization, social media hashtags, and content marketing. Since social media updates and marketing is happening across the world wide web faster than you blink, using hashtag strategy is vital for small and large firms to boost brand awareness.
The fact remains that all brands rely on popular hashtags nowadays to help optimize their social media posts and content. To increase your customer reach in the global market, it is vital to use social media hash-tags in addition to analytics software.
Let us first have a glimpse of what social media hashtags are before exploring how to use them to gain a competitive advantage for your business?
What is a Social Media Hashtag?
So you must be wondering what is a hashtag in social media and why we use hashtags in social media? A hashtag is a common term used by marketers to incorporate a pound (#) sign before a word or a phrase to improve the visibility and effectiveness of their social media posts. People are interested in finding new topics, videos, images, and blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Hashtags are important because they allow users to search for a particular topic on the social media platform when they use a specific keyword with a hashtag.
When hashtags are used with a keyword or a phrase, it becomes easy to spell them out without spaces such as # hashtag. A hashtag can also contain a numeric item; however, punctuation marks or symbols are not allowed in hashtags. In a social media post or content, you can easily place a hashtag at the start, middle, or end of your social media posts or comments.
That means using the hashtags strategy in your social posts and comments allow the users to still find your posts whether they are your followers or not. Hashtags can not only attract your target audience to your social media pages but also helps you identify your customers and people interested in your product.
FACT: In 2018, there were 3.7 million brand-sponsored influencer posts on the social platform (Instagram).What’s more, Women accounted for 56.4% of Instagram users in the U.S. as of February 2020. (HubSpot)
How Can a Hashtag in Social Media Promote Your Business?
Now that you know what is a social media hashtag and which social media uses hashtags, let us see how hashtag use in social media campaigns can promote your small or large business. Marketers often use hashtags on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram; however, you can also use them on other platforms such as Google+, YouTube, or Pinterest. These hashtags can offer myriad benefits to marketers and business owners looking to improve their customer outreach.
Hashtag use in social media is important to raise the awareness of your brand and also help digital marketers to boost their search engine optimization (SEO). However, this history of hashtags goes back to the Twitter platform that urged other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to also incorporate them. Adding hashtag functionality into your post can work wonders for you to help customers find related posts related to specific topics.
You might be wondering which social media uses hashtags. In addition to the aforementioned platforms, an extensive list of social media platforms is using hashtags nowadays, including Tumblr and YouTube. Most social platforms are getting busy day by day, and that is why we use the hashtag in social media content to get more fruitful results. Therefore, hashtags use is crucial in social media for small businesses that ensure added content visibility and brand recognition.
Now that we have covered the concepts of using hashtags in social media and why we use the hashtag in social media posts, the next question arises: How can you identify and use the social media hash-tags in your business campaigns to boost your marketing efforts and gain new customers.
To increase your brand awareness and business visibility, you can use a multitude of hashtags that are important for your success. Let us first identify five types of hashtags that can give you foremost importance in a vast ocean of posts on social media.
Now you should know why we use hashtag in social media and what is a social media hashtag.
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5 Types of Hashtags to Boost your Business Marketing
1. Branded Hashtags
The most important type of hashtag used by business marketers is branded hashtags. Because this hashtag is short, it is easy to remember by your customers or anyone searching for your specific product to solve their problem or meet their needs. These short hashtags are memorable for even young children that tactically include your brand name.
If you are finding it hard to find the appropriate hashtags for your business, then do some research on what your business can use. There are many branded hashtags that your customers might be used without you knowing it. Moreover, once you use a branded hashtag to promote your social media posts, you should use them consistently in your business.
For example, a branded hashtag like #serenaandlily is useful for the organization in every social media post, including Instagram or Facebook. The results show that using this hashtag brought 14k new users to their social media posts. Here is an example of a branded hashtag:
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(Image Credit: AdEspresso)
2. Community Hashtags
The most important type of hashtag for larger brands is community hashtags to help their customers engage with their business. These hashtags include your brand’s name; you can use the community hashtag on a product image that features your best product. That hashtag will feature your brand in the best manner on your social feed.
Using social media, hashtags practice is an intelligent effort that offers many advantages. For example, when you use community hashtags, your customers become more loyal and find you more honest and full of integrity. They can feel like they are part of your larger social community; customers can meet more like-minded people by engaging with that specific community. For instance:
As the customers find these hashtags and posts on your social pages, they can raise awareness of your product and spread the word more quickly. For example, if your company is a small digital marketing firm called “best digital”, and then you can ask your customers to include the #bestdigital hashtag to share how they are using your services for their website traffic. That raises awareness for other clients who might be looking for your specific and affordable digital marketing services.
3. Campaign Hashtags
Campaign hashtags are also important social media hash-tags because they are used as a part of a marketing campaign or a contest with a starting or ending date. This type of hashtag is important that allows your customers to track the contests and any new entries. Using campaign hashtags can significantly measure conversions more effectively. Because these hashtags contain your brand name, you can include your own slogan to boost your campaign. The image below shows a campaign hashtag:
(Image Credit: Shane Barker)
4. Event Hashtags
The fourth type of important hashtags is events hashtags. Similar to campaign hashtags, event hashtags also contain a start and an end date. Businesses can use event hashtags to create more conversions related to your company event. Brands can also use event hashtags for promoting their conferences by sharing their appropriate information with customers. For instance:
(Image Credit: AdEspresso)
5. Trending Hashtags
Knowing the latest marketing trends is important for both customers and brands. Your business can use this popular strategy for hashtag marketing by using trending hashtags. Small businesses often need posts that provide them fast conversions. If you want your content to go viral and improve its ability to impact more customers on social media, then trending hashtags can give you a major benefit.
If you learn the technique of using trending hashtags effectively, then the brand exposure and payoff can be better. For example, if you use Twitter for your apparel business, then a trending hashtag can make your campaign viral to help customers capture that most popular tweets.
However, this type of strategy for using trending hashtags can be problematic. Unless you are already tracking conversions in your social media feeds, using trending hashtags requires you to be more attentive. Before jumping into this strategy of using trending hashtags, you must first know why a post is trending. Listen to your intuition and gut feeling to figure out whether your company should use this type of hashtag. Not all businesses are the best fit for that type of hashtag. Here is how you find trending hashtags on Twitter:
Using a Hashtag Strategy for your Business
So far, you know what a hashtag is in social media and what type of hashtags you can use in social media to boost your marketing campaigns. Now the next phase is to plan and explore how you can implement and track an effective hashtag marketing strategy to get a competitive advantage.
Finding the Right Hashtags for Your Business Promotion
If your company is involved in digital marketing, then you must use the target keywords for search engine optimization. Using an appropriate keyword analysis tool can help you find the best keyword in your campaigns. Identify the volume and use of posts related to chosen hashtags.
Social media marketing is not so straight forward; however, you can easily get started on various social platforms such as Twitter or Instagram. Twitter allows marketers to search for many options to connect with the most popular keywords and hashtags. Moreover, if you rely on Instagram for your social media promotion, then the platform also provides a search bar to view the number of social media posts with tags related to your hashtag.
Did you know??? Social selling leaders are 51% more likely to reach quota. In fact, salespeople active on social media report 45% more sales opportunities. (HubSpot)
1. Know what you are Trending with Hashtags
For remaining relevant on social media, you need to use hashtags that people search for. For example, you can search Twitter and find out trending topics related to your brand or product. You can also find internationally trending topics if you market your services or product in global markets. You can use social mentions on Twitter for cross-platform media trends. This strategy will allow you to identify the top-performing hashtags for any search item.
Moreover, another vital strategy is not to overuse hashtags. Instagram is the only platform that allows you more flexibility to use multiple hashtags. However, on other platforms such as Facebook, you should check the use of hashtags that can overwhelm your users. Twitter also allows a 140 character limit for hashtags.
Therefore, using trending hashtags with a limit can boost your business campaign effectively.
2. Include Diverse Hashtags
Most firms use hashtags suggested to them by their marketing teams and analysts. Moreover, Google+ also allows marketers to know suggested hashtags for your social media posts. However, the suggested hashtags by your team or Google+ are not always the best hashtags to boost your business revenues.
It is always good to use the experts’ suggestions and incorporate the most trending hashtags; however, you should always add more hashtags on trending topics. As you share the content on various social platforms, consider using at least three new hashtags on each platform to help clients find you.
3. Use Search Tools and Filters
Since hashtags are vital marketing tools for businesses to boost their campaigns, you can use the most sophisticated technology tools such as SEMRush to look for the best SEO-related hashtags. You should find new content in your niche using SEMRush and connect with customers who are sharing it.
Moreover, in addition to external outreach, hashtags also work well for internal use. That way, you can filter posts and track success. A better strategy is to use a hashtag combination that is hard to hijack. According to a search engine journal post, you can easily make your hashtags a bag of dirt as many companies are trying to use the same hashtags.
4. Create your Own Hashtags to Suit Your Needs
When you create a social media post and wish to use hashtags, then you can always create your own hashtags and use them again and again for your social campaigns. That does not require you to do something extraordinary to create your own hashtags for Twitter or Facebook. All you need to take care of creating relevant and trending hashtags to use them consistently in your campaigns.
Since businesses learn a lot from their competitors, hashtag research is the best example of that. You would not want to copy every single hashtag your competitors are using and include them in your campaign. However, constantly looking for new hashtags of competitors can give you many appropriate ideas to create your own hashtags.
Also, a good strategy is to track your influencers in addition to competitors. Influencers in your specific industry or niche market are your guiding light to know what they are doing to get people on their websites. That will give you a great list of ideas to generate your best hashtags.
Finally, when you have created the list of your own hashtags, it is time to test them before overwhelming the customers. A best industry practice is to use only three hashtags per post that are relevant to your content. To test the hashtags you have finalized, share them in your messages and spread them over a week or two. Look out for hashtags that outperform other hashtags. Trying hashtags before incorporating them in social posts can help you amplify their use.
We hope that you found this article useful.
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The Best Tools to Research your Hashtags
Your hunt for finding the best hashtags can be continuous. However, the good news is that there are ample tools available to help you streamline that hashtags search.
1. SEMRush
Whether you are a director of SEO or social media marketing, SEMRush is your No.1 companion tool for searching for the best hashtags for your business. Since hashtags are much similar to keywords in your content, you can use SEMRush and view the keywords report to find better ways to tag your content. However, using a combination of SEMRush and other tools can help to create a unified hashtag strategy.
(Image Credit: SEMrush)
2. Keywordtool.io
Keywordtool.io is another popular software that polls different Google databases to help marketers search for the best keywords. You can use them as hashtags. However, the options in this tool are limited, it is a good strategy to use it with SEMRush.
(Image Credit: Keyword Tool)
3. TweetBinder
As the name suggests, Tweetbinder allows you to explore different Tweets against a single hashtag. The tool is available in both free subscription-based. Your small business can use the free version easily to analyze 300 keywords. You can also explore Twitter mentions and uses in an excel sheet.
(Image Credit: Hostripples)
4. Iconsquare
If you use Instagram for your social media marketing, then Iconsquare is a great tool to plan your hashtags strategy. It provides all the metrics related to your Instagram account. It is a good way to search for public trending hashtags on Instagram but also allows you to monitor how good your current hashtags are performing.
(Image Credit: Social Media Examiner)
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Using social media hashtags can raise awareness about your brand on Twitter, Instagram, and many other social platforms. As you incorporate hashtags into your social posts, they can boost your business in multiple ways. All you need to do is to plan your strategy according to suggestions in this post and invest some resources and time to reach your local or global target audience. Hashtags can help you to grow your business without hefty investments.
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FAQ’s
Search Google without the “#” symbol both with and without spaces between the words. Tools like Hashtagify and Ahrefs Keyword Explorer can help as well. Search Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms to see if your hashtag has been used before.
Here are some of the top hashtag tips.
- Always use the # symbol before your chosen keywords.
- Don’t use any punctuation between words.
- Don’t put any characters immediately before the #.
- Use both letters and numbers, never use numbers alone.
- Keep it short and sweet!
The purpose of a hashtag is to connect social media content to specific topics, events or conversations. Because hashtags effectively group topics, it makes tracking specific topics easier and finding content on those topics as well.
Yes, hashtags can increase followers especially on Instagram. Instagram allows 30 hashtags per post maximum, however, it’s important to keep them relevant to the post. Use both branded and content hashtags.
Every year, the use of hashtags on Facebook grows. Users can now link their Instagram and Facebook accounts, which is making it easier than ever before to see the effectiveness of your campaigns.
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