Hashtag Marketing – Back to Basics

28 Oct Hashtag Marketing – Back to Basics

Hashtags have a bad reputation if you are not directly in the digital marketing space. To the common user they appear to be an annoying trend that people use to make jokes that aren’t very funny. As a business owner looking to dominate the social space, let them make jokes about hashtag marketing, because in the end you will have the last laugh.

Hashtags are the social search engines. It groups together like ideas in a way that helps get relevant users on the same page. Find the full definition to Hashtag here.

Being able to tag a post on social platforms with a hashtag helps reach more users in an organic fashion (without paying for it). Bottom line, your business can not afford to be missing out on the hashtag bandwagon. However, in order for you to hashtag correctly there are several things to consider.

1. Make Your Hashtags informative & Relevant

Please don’t create a post about one topic and hashtag another. Remember, hashtags are being used by many as a search engine (even if they don’t know it), and if they are landing on content completely unrelated to what they assumed they would find it will be a bad user experience. Make the hashtag descriptive enough that they know the type of content they will be getting.

2. Keep it simple

Long hashtags should be used solely for making fun of hashtagging. Keep your hashtags down to a couple of words at most or it is confusing to the user and can be misconstrued as something else (anyone else remember #susananalbumpparty?)  You also don’t want hashtags to be too long because it means there is a smaller chance that it will up the reach of your post.

3. Limit the number of hashtags per post

We all see the posts from businesses or personal pages that have about 20 hashtags following the actual post. This is one strategy that some people use to get more reach for their posts. Unfortunately this only acceptable on Instagram which has its own set of hashtagging rules. Digital marketing experts recommend 2-4 hashtags as a good amount of hashtags to include with a post for optimal reach and minimal annoyance to users.

4. Use hashtags in sentences

Include the hashtag in the sentence of the post if possible and not just at the end of the post. The answer for doing this is simple. It saves space in the post, and it helps the hashtags look relevant to the user.

5. Use trending hashtags if relevant

Keep up to date on what’s trending currently. If it’s relevant to your post, don’t be afraid to use it! This helps with reach of the post and will also show your users that you are on top of the trends.

6. Don’t waste time on one-word hashtags

This is huge. So many businesses make the mistake of hashtagging every word in a sentence to get a point across. This is wrong. First your users WILL find this annoying and second, the hashtags are too broad. Unless you have a certain word that your company uses for branding and it’s working, still to more targeted multi word hashtags.

If you are a business owner working on a digital marketing strategy, you need to make sure hashtags are included in the social portion of it. With the social platforms leaning more towards paid ads, the organic reach of your posts is incredibly low. Correct hashtagging can help keep social media marketing costs down, while propelling your reach to more users.

Now here’s an every popular video on making fun of hashtagging. It’s a great laugh, but keep on hashtagging!