If you’ve ever spent time on social media, you’re likely aware of companies incorporating hashtags into their posts. These tags help categorize and increase the reach of their content as well as the number of interactions they get. When they are used correctly, they can be beneficial for businesses when it comes to promoting their products and services. However, there are important elements to keep in mind before adding them to your social feeds. Here is what you need to know about using hashtags as part of your marketing strategy.
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Research the Right Hashtags to Use
It can be tempting to load a post for your business with every hashtag you can think of. This can do more harm than good, however. If you add either too many hashtags or a lot of tags that are irrelevant to your business, it can lead to negative impacts from an SEO standpoint. Doing research on potential hashtags can solve this problem. You can do this by looking at posts from others in your industry, such as peers or bloggers, to see what terms they are using. Another option is to use tools that are dedicated to finding hashtags, like Hashtagify and RiteTag. These tools help provide insight on the terms used most by industry leaders, helping you determine tags that have the best potential to reach an audience.
Simple is Good
Now that you have an idea of what you want your hashtag to be, the next step is to create it for use. When implementing a hashtag, you want to make sure it’s simple and easy to remember. You don’t want to have a hashtag that people could make typos with. This can make it less discoverable in searches and makes people less likely to use it. You can also capitalize each word in the tag to make it stand out.
Don’t Overdo It
You’ve seen hashtags used constantly on social sites. From a traffic standpoint, tweets that have hashtags are engaged with twice as much as tweets. You can search for hashtags that are popular at the moment or are being used frequently among your competitors, or create a hashtag that is exclusive to your business. Doing the latter can help collect and organize content about your brand.
However, while adding hashtags can benefit your campaign, adding too many does the exact opposite. Studies show that a tweet that has more than two hashtags included has their engagement drop by 17%. So, one or two hashtags serve as the best practice. In addition, make sure that any included hashtags are relevant to the context of your tweet. This prevents any mishaps from not understanding what a hashtag is being used for.
It also helps to know the best practices of how many hashtags to use depending on the site you are using. Every social site typically has its own suggestion for the right amount of hashtags to use; for example, with Twitter, two is the recommended number of hashtags to use to best work within character count limits. Knowing the suggested number of hashtags for each site will help expand your reach without the risks of your posts being flagged.
Create For Engagement
When done right, a hashtag can serve as a great way to build your brand. It gives your client base a way to communicate and connect with each other using your hashtags. From a business standpoint, it means more opportunities for you to target potential users and improve customer relations. That said, there are some things to avoid in terms of engagement as well. You don’t want to use your hashtag in every post or dialogue you have with a customer.
You also want to use your hashtag on a consistent basis, which will also help drive engagement. Doing so can lead to boosts in message association, brand awareness, and purchase intent. A social media scheduling tool can be beneficial in automating when you want posts to go out.
Hashtags can be a huge boost to any marketing strategy. Once you know the correct ones to use and how often to use them, you increase the opportunities for engagement with your current customers and improve the chances of attracting new users.