With millions of active users on social media platforms, it is no wonder that digital marketers are trying to come up with innovative strategies to broaden their reach. You can find millions of posts with hashtags on every platform.
But, how effective is it from a business point-of-view? Will a couple of hashtags help with increasing your reach?
It is undeniable that adding hashtags will help in getting a majority of impressions. Nevertheless, before piloting you through the process of “hashtagging”, you have to understand them as they are intended to.
How do hashtags work?
To put it in simple words, each hashtag works as a bucket. Whenever you add a hashtag to a post, your content is added to that bucket along with every other post that uses the same hashtag. If someone searches for a particular hashtag term, they would see every post added to that hashtag bucket.
Avoiding hashtags in your digital marketing strategy will be an expensive mistake. There are several ways in which using hashtags in your social media posts can benefit you:
- It can help to increases the reach of your campaign
- It helps to build brand awareness
- You can gain more followers who are likely to become your potential customers
Identifying the ideal hashtags to gain leverage:
In order to help a wider audience discover your brand, you can use some popular, pre-existing hashtags that are relevant to your content. One can seamlessly find them by running a quick search on various social media platforms. You can also use third-party sites like Hashtagify, Sked Social, and All Hashtag to generate relevant hashtags based on the keyword you enter.
Monitoring your competitors is one of the successful ways to identify hashtags with high potential since you are trying to reach the same demographic. You can also look up some trending hashtags instead of industry-oriented hashtags to include in your creative posts.
If you are a product-based company or looking forward to building brand awareness, creating your own hashtag is the best idea. Typically, they are based on the name of a product, event, or the company itself.
If your target demographic starts using your hashtag for their user-generated content, your campaign is heading in the right direction. You can get opportunities to connect with your audience.
Being concise and specific:
Using hashtags irrelevantly can be a major backlash for your marketing strategy and several big brands like Dove and McDonalds have been criticized publicly for it. Failing to research a hashtag before using it will not draw the attention you intended.
Using too many hashtags is not a clever move as it will spammy to your audience and eventually overkills your post. Twitter recommends that you use, about, 2 hashtags per tweet, while most people recommend 5-10 hashtags for Instagram and just 1 or 2 hashtags for Facebook.
Finally, you should also avoid using hashtags that are highly popular and generic. For example, if you are a food blogger, then using a hashtag like #food will not favor your post in any way to reach a wider audience as too many people are using it. It is better to use moderately popular hashtags that are relevant, including a branded hashtag, a campaign-specific hashtag, and a community-based or topical hashtag.
The placement of hashtags is also crucial when it comes to widening the reach. Ensure that your hashtags are mentioned below the caption or in the first comment. Since stories draw out maximum leads, make sure that your audiences aren’t distracted by the placement of hashtags in them.
Wrapping up:
As social media marketing poses several challenges while pursuing, one can easily take the wrong turn to end up with disappointing results. To be successful one needs to strategically create and execute the overall plan successfully.
“How to get started?” is obviously your next question. To harness the full potential of social media one might need to experiment with multiple strategies. In the world of “Digital Haystack”, make sure that your needle is found to see the performance in numbers.
