How To Pick Hashtags For Your Social Media Marketing
Hashtags have become a major part of the world we live in, and not just our online lives. People have even started talking in hashtags – although these ones are searchable, so not as useful for marketing and tracking purposes.
The tricky part for marketing is picking the rights ones for your brand and for a specific campaign.
Here’s how you can capitalise on the power of hashtags:
Be Relevant To Your Audience And Brand
Relevancy is a massive word for digital marketing. You need to ensure that the content you’re putting out is relevant to both your brand and to your audience – and this applies to the hashtags you use too. If you’re looking for hashtags that are already in use because you want to jump onto a trend, make sure that they make sense for you.
The same goes for creating new hashtags for your brand. They need to fit with your style and tone of marketing. A formal law office can still use hashtags, they just need to stay away from the slang or colloquial terms that don’t gel with their normal tone.
Don’t Overcomplicate Things
Another important thing to remember is that people need to be able to read your hashtag easily and remember it. Trying to be clever with abbreviations or using too many words in one hashtag can make things too complicated. Remember, you want your hashtag to be easily found and used by the public.
It’s also important to test out your hashtags before you put them out to the public. Give them to someone who doesn’t know what the campaign is about and make sure they read it correctly. When putting a string of words together without spaces, you can end up making other words quite unintentionally within your hashtag.
Always Check The Hashtag Before You Use It
When you’re looking for new hashtags to use, always go and see how other people are using them on the platforms first. It might be the perfect hashtag for your campaign, but it could be used by people completely outside of your target market for something else entirely. If you’re not careful, you could end up aligning your brand with something damaging.
This is also important for trending hashtags. Trying to jump onto a trend to get traction for your brand is a great marketing ploy for social media. However, you have to do it in a way that’s sensitive to what the trend is about. Research the hashtag and look at the tone people are using in their content. You need to match that tone if you want to be taken seriously on the trend. It’s also worth considering not getting onto the trend if it doesn’t match your brand.
Don’t Use Too Many Hashtags
Hashtags are great for getting your content to spread and to reach an audience outside of your followers. This can lead to the assumption that more hashtags are better. This is definitely not the case.
Studies have shown that if you go over 10 hashtags in one post, you’re likely to see less engagement and less traffic from your post. In fact, Instagram is the only place where it’s recommended that you use up to 10 hashtags. The other platforms – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest – have a recommendation of only two hashtags per post. TikTok is in the middle, with a recommendation of no more than five hashtags per post.
At the same time, you also need to think about not using the same hashtags over and over again on the platforms. This can damage your rankings within the algorithms and cause your content to get seen less.