In the past few years, the social media landscape has evolved at a rapid pace with hashtags at the core of this evolution!
Hashtags are an integral part of the entire social media marketing that decides the fate of your posts on social media platforms.
What Exactly is a Hashtag?
In simple terms, a hashtag is a pound sign or a hash (#) followed by key phrase or a word. This is like a label for the content that you usually post on social media. This allows people to quickly find a specific type of content on social media.
If used correctly, hashtags help you to drive the attention of your targeted audience towards your post and also help increase your brand engagement. A hashtag involves both numbers and characters but not symbols. By incorporating trending and relevant hashtags in your post, you can make your post visible to anyone who is interested in that type of content.
Power of Hashtags for Businesses
When it comes to marketing your products and services on social media, hashtags play a crucial role. A hashtag makes your social media post more discoverable across the social media channels.
Previously, hashtags were used on Twitter only, but now these are used on every social media platform including Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Incorporating trending and relevant hashtags in your social media posts helps you to expand your reach, increase your post engagement, and enhance your brand image. However, it’s imperative to use brand-relevant hashtags to reap great results.
Let’s dig deeper to understand the power of hashtags in the social media landscape!
Following are the tips for using hashtags for effective social media marketing.
Research Well Before You Jump into Hashtagging
Just like you do keyword research in search engine optimization (SEO), it is important to do the same for hashtags as a part of effective social media marketing. It though may seem that hashtags are scattered, and you may be required to pick the ones which are relevant for the context you are using them in. Well, hashtags may have positive as well as a negative impact on your post. So, choose them wisely, and stay away from the ones that are likely to create controversy.
Keep in mind that your careless selection of hashtags can damage your entire brand value in digital space. So, search well about every hashtag before you use them in your social media post.
Simplicity is the Key
Keep in mind that there is no use of posting something on social media that your audience can’t understand.
Obviously, this will be a waste of time and resources!
So, it’s imperative to choose a hashtag that people can easily remember.
There are millions of short and long hashtags dispersed in the social media universe. However, a simple and short hashtag can bring more reaches and engagements as compared to the long ones. Long hashtags are difficult to pronounce and may not give you the desired results.
Thus, make sure that you use simple and short hashtags in your social media posts, so that they can reach a larger audience.
Involve Trending Hashtags in Your Posts
In this digital age, most of people are familiar about the term, “Trending”.
You must hear about people talking about “what’s trending now”. In simple terms, trending refers to the topics that gain popularity in a limited amount of time. If you are a twitter user, you may have seen the trending section that consists of topics associated with trending hashtags.
However, trending hashtags keep on changing every day, just like the daily news. Thus, it’s important to be on the lookout for the latest online trends, and whenever you see a trending hashtag that can fit into your post, just use it!
Using trending hashtags in your social media posts help you to reach a larger audience and boost your brand awareness in the entire social media universe.
Moreover, a trending hashtag can help you to increase your brand’s visibility in the social media landscape. However, make sure that the hashtag is relevant with your post so that your post can boom in the digital space.
Limit Your Hashtags Use
You may have seen many posts packed with loads of hashtags on Instagram.
It clearly looks spam!!!
Hashtags are used to categorize the type of post that you are sharing. You don’t need to stuff all the hashtags together in your single post, as that may ruin your post.
This is completely wrong.
Hashtags play an important role in social media marketing. Thus, it’s essential to focus on how you are using them. You should use simple, short and relevant hashtags to give an outline of what you are sharing on your social media handles.
Try to be Unique
The end goal of using hashtags in social media posts is to reach a larger audience to increase brand engagement. However, if you want to engage with your targeted audience, you need to be more specific.
You can’t just rely upon very broad or generic hashtags like #socialmedia or #marketing. Instead, you need to incorporate unique and specific hashtags in your social media posts to gain desired results.
Wrapping It Up!
Doubtlessly, hashtags are the most powerful tool that you can use to outshine your business in the world of social media. It’s a great way to attract new audiences, increase brand awareness, and boost your engagement rate. So, if you want to win the social media game, then you should include hashtagging as a regular practice, in your social media marketing strategy.
Social media marketing is evolving rapidly, with new features rolling out every now and then. So, if you want to stay ahead of your competitors, keep your eyes on the latest social media marketing trends.
