How Can Hashtags Improve Your Social Media Reach?
Social media is a vast space. To be easily discoverable, companies take the help of various techniques and useful elements to increase their visibility and actively engage with their audience. One such feature is a hashtag.
Hashtags play an important role in helping audiences find the content they’re looking for and by including them in their content, help brands or companies be found.
What are Hashtags?
Any phrase written without any space – that may or may not include a number – prefaced by the ‘#’ symbol is called a hashtag, and it is a metadata tag. They are used by photo-sharing platforms such as Instagram and micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter to cross-reference related content.
What is the Significance of Hashtags in Social Media?
Hashtags are vital for social media as they make it easier for the users to find what they’re looking for. They can simply search for any hashtag, be it any particular event, celebrity, or anything else under the sun, and find everything related to it, provided the hashtag in question was used when the content they’re looking for was uploaded.
How to find the best Hashtags?
This is the first step that should be taken when choosing them for social media content. Finding the best hashtags is not as easy as it sounds, and is a little more complex than just searching for the possible hashtags on different platforms.
Using tools such as RiteTag can be great when it comes to determining which hashtags are trending or popular on Twitter and Instagram, related to your particular content.
Tips on how to make the best use of Hashtags for Social Media
Given below are a few things that should be kept in mind when using hashtags for social media content:
1. Keep It Simple and Clear
As mentioned above, you need to keep your hashtags simple as well as clear, so that they’re easy to understand and later on used. You need to choose words that can be remembered easily and not go for hashtags that are too wordy or difficult to read.
The hashtag you choose should clearly convey the message you want to convey to your audience without confusing them or making them wonder what exactly you mean. So remember – simple, crisp, and concise.
2. Make Sure to Use Trending Hashtags
As we all know very well, certain hashtags gain immense popularity in a very short period of time owing to some event or personality, and then they are listed on the ‘Trending Now’ list.
More often than not, these are centered around the news and current happenings around the world. So if you can manage to incorporate trending hashtags in your content, only if they’re relevant and they don’t necessarily have to be restricted to the news, do it. This will lead to your content being viewed by a much larger crowd.
Try to stay on top of trends so that you are among the initial ones to use a trending hashtag. Further, you can use monitoring sites, Hashtag Analytics, Trendsmap, etc. to get the latest hashtags.
3. Maintain Consistency Across Different Social Media Channels
Hashtags are there to improve your viability in the various social media channels. To do this, you need to ensure that you’re using the same hashtags on your different profiles to maintain consistency so that it is easier for people to remember it.
However, restrictions vary from platform to platform, such as the character limit on Twitter, so you should plan accordingly. Try to keep at least one keyword in mind while creating the hashtags.
4. Do a Quick Search Before Using a Hashtag
After choosing your hashtag(s), you need to do proper research and make sure that it is not being used for any wrong reasons. You should always do this as you’ll get to know if another brand is using that same hashtag or not (which should never be the case).
By researching, you’ll get to know if that particular hashtag is being used in a negative connotation and then you can avoid using it, instead of coming to know about it later.
5. Never Overdo It
This is an extremely vital tip, for all those who use hashtags and all who are planning to incorporate them in their content. Don’t use too many hashtags as then it’ll come across as forceful or just spam. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience.
6. Ensure That You’re Using Relevant Hashtags
When targeting a particular set of audience, a community, or a demographic, you need to be very specific. To be specific, you need to use only hashtags that are relevant to that particular group so that it resonates with them and they actively resonate with your content.
7. Get Creative
You don’t have to be all strict and stringent about the rules when coming up with hashtags, contrary to what we have said till now. While those are important tips, you need to also unleash your creative side when coming up with hashtags.
Nowadays, people are coming up with quirky and catchy hashtags left and right since they help them in standing out. If you can do this, the audience will automatically remember you since it’ll somehow stay with them and they’ll come back to you.
8. Work on Brand Engagement
The whole purpose behind coming up with hashtags, researching them, and using them in the social media content, is to increase engagement with the audience. The hashtags you end up using will play a major role in this but after that, you need to work on engagement as well.
The more relatable, easygoing, and relevant your content is, the more customers you’ll draw in that will eventually improve your brand engagement. But another tip – never use hashtags when you’re answering someone.
Conclusion
One of the most important takeaways that every person reading this article should take is that don’t just be dependent on your keywords to create hashtags. Come up with cool and quirky hashtags of your own as well, related to your content of course, so that it stays in your audience’s minds.
If you’re looking to study topics such as social media marketing and other aspects of digital marketing, make sure that you go over the various courses offered by Simpliskills and consider becoming a digital marketer today.