Posted by Shivali Anand
November 18, 2021 | 4-minute read (787 words)
If your knowledge of #hashtag usage is limited to what's trending on Twitter, you may be losing out on a valuable marketing opportunity.
Hashtags are an excellent way for entrepreneurs to create their brand, advertise their business and expand their audience. Used correctly, they can boost long-term traffic, encourage backlinks and make your content simpler to find on social media.
Here are recommendations for optimizing your business’s hashtag for marketing.
Analyze your hashtags
Before you deploy hashtags, do some research. The more relevant and precise the hashtags are, the greater possibilities you'll have in terms of reaching your audience. Research your target market, social media influencers and companies that share your ideal user base to locate appropriate hashtags. Use hashtag monitoring tools to keep up with developing trends among consumers and influencers.
Use relevant and specific hashtags
Make sure that your hashtags are relevant to your brand and audience, and that they correspond to your content. Using content-specific hashtags helps people find your posts when searching those specific topics. Using detailed and specific hashtags gives the audience a clear idea of the subject of the conversation.
Use popular hashtags pertaining to your industry
Consult online data analytics to identify currently trending hashtags in your sector, then create content accordingly. Using popular hashtags to promote your product, service, business, or content can potentially reach a huge audience, raising brand recognition in the process.
Experiment with less-competitive hashtags in your industry
Experiment with relevant tags that are used less frequently. Before you use a hashtag, find out who else is using it. Determine the number and frequency of posts related to your selected hashtag.
Use a hashtag that is both branded and campaign-specific
Create a unique branded hashtag that hasn't been used before by another business. Otherwise, consumers may get confused and mistakenly identify your brand with other content. For the campaign hashtag, you may use your business or brand name, the name of a specific product, or a tagline or phrase (slogan) that connects to your brand.
To raise brand recognition, your brand or campaign hashtags should be used on a regular basis. Encourage your customers to use your hashtags as well.
Promote your personalized hashtag
Use your social media profiles to promote your branded hashtags, as well as offline marketing. Make sure to promote your hashtag in all of your marketing initiatives, including your website, email and newsletters, in addition to your bio. In the initial remark on your blog, Try to use your brand hashtags in the first comment of your posts. Include your hashtag on promotional materials, such as posters and business cards.
Analyze the performance of your competitors’ hashtags
Identify the content and campaigns that perform best for your rivals to fine-tune your hashtag approach.
Analyze and evaluate your hashtag's performance
Knowing which hashtags to use and how to implement them is a good start. Next, look at which hashtags are your best performers (successful on past posts) and are leading followers to your page. You may also track the performance of your campaign and brand hashtags in terms of mentions, views and followers using analytics tools.
Use hashtags specific to your community or industry
These hashtags (social media posts) are directly relevant to your community. These can help connect you with target clients or people in your niche who can assist you in growing your business.
Use the optimal number of hashtags
The quantity of hashtags in a post varies per platform, but two to five hashtags have the most significant influence in most circumstances. Check out platform-specific practices to boost hashtag performance.
Use hashtags relevant to the image you’re posting
Even though adding hashtags to captions can make it easier to find your posts, it's the image that will initially draw them in. Always use high-quality photographs or videos on your page.
Experiment with hashtag variations
People may have already seen and dismissed your material if you've been using the same hashtags for months. You may reach a new audience by changing it up a bit. Create tags to promote giveaways, special offers and contents to attract more customers.
Use a hashtag to draw attention to a specific issue
Hashtags that raise awareness about a particular issue may result in a large amount of user-generated content. Also, followers will perceive your business as socially responsible.
Steer clear of these hashtag practices:
- Don't slap a bunch of hashtags on a post and hope for the best. Too many hashtags can make a post look like spam.
- Use relevant hashtags only if they're popular. Otherwise, you risk confusing your audience and losing out on potential followers.
- Careless tagging can hurt your brand and make your posts hard to spot for the audience.
