Love them or hate them, but if you’re an active Twitter, Tumblr or Instagram user, you can’t escape the infamous hashtags.
They’ve become so much of a culture phenomenon that even Facebook adopted this approach in 2013, although Twitter was the first social media platform to utilise this method way back in 2007.
But did you know that when used correctly, hashtags can really help increase your social media presence?
Hashtags make your content discoverable and put you in front of users you may have never successfully targeted, but how do you cater to hit targets on every platform? Well, that’s where we can help…
For any social media platform, it starts with research.
Spend the time to get to know your audiences, and even your competitors, to see what types of keywords they use, what times they post, and do they even have their own hashtag? There is so many things to consider!
For Instagram…
Although Instagram is solely imagery, Instagram’s hashtags have a lot of purposes for brands and consumers alike.
Brands and businesses can easily create a solid marketing approach that includes Instagram hashtags, but for some accounts it can come across as forced or unconventional.
Nearly 60% of Instagram’s users are between 18 and 29 years old and will easily let you know if your marketing efforts aren’t quite up to scratch.
However, there’s definitely a method behind the madness, as each post with at least one hashtag tends to receive 12.6% more engagement.
For increasing likes and followers, use the correct hashtags that are relevant to your business, and ensure to time your posts for when you know your followers will be the most active.
Instagram has also enabled a new tool where it offers suggested hashtags to ones you’ve used in the past, enabling you to tap into new hashtags that you may have ended up missing!
For Twitter…
Twitter is different to Instagram.
Although the hashtags on both social media platforms pose the same outcome, if businesses overuse their hashtags and post excessively, the post can be overlooked as consumers don’t want to decipher through all the hashtags to get to the real content!
For Twitter, less is more, but pick out relevant keywords in your industry, whether you add them at the end of the tweet or throughout your sentences.
For local businesses, if you want to introduce yourself to your local market, research your local Twitter hour to engage with other local other like-minded individuals.
For Facebook…
Facebook hashtags aren’t as popular as Twitter and Instagram but can be utilised all the same.
According to recent studies, posts with just 1 or 2 hashtags on Facebook averaged 593 interactions, whereas posts with more than 10 hashtags averaged 188 interactions.
That’s a huge margin, especially if you’re a small business wanting to introduce yourself to new target consumers, therefore it would be beneficial to keep your ‘hashtagging’ to a minimum.
We recommend using the same strategy for Twitter and integrate your hashtags within your sentence structures and then the consumer won’t be put off reading through all the hashtags you’ve posted.
Our final thought!
Finally, one other simple tricks, is to create your own for use on any platform, encouraging followers to engage with you and your business through your own branded hashtag.
There you can monitor the following you’ve got from consumers sharing your content, without having to open up any of your analytic measurement tools.
And Voila! You’ll be a hashtagging expert in no time!
If you’re looking for further advice or support on how to increase Social Media engagement, please get in touch with team Make More Noise today.