The Do's and Don'ts of Hashtags
Once your phones pound sign, now a popular symbol across the whole of the internet and social media platforms! As you all should know by now, hashtags have become a widely spread popular marketing tool. They help to group up subjects of content together so that other users can find the content they are looking for easier. The hashtag is now one of the most popular forms of categorising information on the internet. In fact, the term 'Hashtag' has become so widely known that it has been added to the Oxford Dictionary!
Yet even as most people, these days are aware of hashtags and what they do, not everyone uses them appropriately and correctly. Knowing how to use hashtags is a sure way of getting your business to the top of the digital social ladder. Below I have made a brief list of the do's and don’ts of using hashtags throughout your marketing plan.
Do's
Come up with relevant hashtags
There are a lot of hashtags out there that people have created and are already using. I would recommend that you use existing hashtags therefore, add your content to larger groups where people are more likely to see it. This is a good starting point and will give you the most engagement possible to help advertise your business, but creating your own hashtags also adds a creative spin to your content. It will take a while for your newly created tags to take effect and become popular, but they will be specific to your brand and help people to find your business's content easier.
The hashtags you create shouldn't contain your brand's name as these will not take off very well. Instead, create tags that are relevant to the products and services your company provides!
Consider the Social Platform
For every social platform that you use to post your social content onto, you need to consider the audience and how each platform runs when deciding on your hashtags. For example, for Instagram, you would generally use quite a few relevant hashtags to increase your engagement as this platform works best with more hashtags. Whereas for Facebook, you would generally only use around 0-2 relevant hashtags as this platform does not rely on hashtags to put content in front of relevant people, instead relies mainly on paid advertisements.
Be specific!
When using hashtags, make sure they are all specific to what your business is about. If your business is a barber, then you would only use hashtags with relevant topics such as; #beardtrim, #barber and #haircut. If you want to cater to a specific audience, make your hashtags specific!
Hashtags that are too long
This is a simple but easily made mistake by some marketers and other users. Creating hashtags that are too long will end up deterring your audience. Not many people will want to type in something that is too lengthy! Quite simply, keep your hashtags short and simple. Hashtags are supposed to make things easier to find and engage with for your audience, not trying to make things difficult to find.
Hashtag Everything...
Having a variety of different hashtags can be beneficial when advertising your company as it gives users more of a chance of coming across your business. Although, the truth is that having way more hashtags than your actual content, isn't going to do you any favours. Not everything you create is going to into every category – only using a smaller amount of relevant tags will help greatly improve your engagement.
Conclusion
Hashtags are an important part of marketing, especially when using social media platforms. Hashtags, in theory, can be the difference between what makes or breaks your online strategy.