The Life of a #Hashtag

Hashtags have now become a tool for making a topic trend and monitoring the performance of a campaign. Regardless of the origin of #hashtag, it has served its purpose.
 

The History of Hashtags

Hashtags arenow considered a part of the pop-culture. During the early days, the hashtag was developed mainly for social media only. But as digital marketing developed, hashtags have become widely adapted by the advertising and marketing industry both in online and offline advertising.

In 2011, as internet users relate a hashtag to social media it has become widely misunderstood, misused and abused. There was even an incident as Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake made a video skit hashtagging their way through a conversation.

As time goes and hashtags have become understood they are used by individuals and companies in promotions and trends in online and digital marketing.

Search Happens – Everywhere

 Hashtags are very effective in finding related content and people talking about a specific topic.

Search happens on social platforms just as it would on Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Searches are being successfully made on Pinterest, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, and just recently Facebook started using hashtags to monitor trends and topics too.

Conversation, content and updates can be optimised with a hashtag. These topics then become visible to other social media platforms and search engines. Its potential uses are is limitless.

Hashtags are extremely powerful as long as you understand how to make them work for you. Here are five tips on where to utilise a hashtag.

1. Research

Get to know the topic that your customers are talking about. Find out how related topics on your product or services are being viewed by your audience. Have a look at what your competitors are doing. Hashtags are useful in recognising the frequency and reach of topics, discussions, and tapping into audience sentiment.

2. Facilitate Discussion

Hashtags serve as your gateway to make people talk and interact. Though various social media would call them different titles such as “hot topic” on GooglePlus or “trending” on Twitter, hashtags have consistently offered a way for you to jump in and join the conversations on related topics.

3. Distribute Updates and News

Television news is scheduled but most people nowadays use the internet to get the latest updates. Hashtags can be customised to bring real time update on topics world-wide.

4. Promote an Event or Conference

Since hashtags are being used to be able to niche down and target specific audiences that will relate and get interested, this is perhaps one of the greatest tools to pre-promote events and other offers. There have been reports and articles on Linkedin about how using hashtags increased 25% of attendees to an event.

5. #Hashtags Are Forever

Everything that you put on the internet is forever. This includes hashtags. Although a certain hashtag may be out of the lime-light after a while, the effect of it in Search Optimisation is incessant.

Summary

Hashtags have proven to be worthy of being part of digital marketing. Hashtags can target and re-target specific audiences making promotion and marketing a lot easier. You just have to know the perfect hashtags to keep your audience engagement attainable.

Teck-nology Design and Marketing offers Social Media Marketing for Business. We create, manage and promote your business in various Social Media platform. Talk to us today.
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