Whether you love or hate hashtags, they are an essential part of social media content. They create little links to help your target audience find you easily on social media and organize content by whatever topics you want.
Knowing how to use hashtags can be tricky; you have to balance using enough to reach your audience without overusing them and making your posts look spammy. This post will help break down the basics of hashtag use for digital marketing.
Where did hashtags come from?
The hashtag symbol was initially called the pound sign and was used to indicate numbers. In 2007, Chris Messina walked into Twitter’s headquarters and made a suggestion that forever changed the face of social media. “He suggested using the ‘pound’ or ‘hash’ character common on phones (this was pre-iPhone) to create groups of related Tweets” (1). After his proposal, Messina began using the hashtag on his own, and it rapidly grew from there.
The Basics of Hashtags
Here is the basic rundown of using hashtags:
Your profiles need to be public in order to have them seen by more than just your followers. Even when using hashtags, if the account or the post is private, the post will not be seen by anyone except your followers.
You cannot use any spaces, punctuations, or symbols in them — aside from the # at the beginning.
Make sure your hashtags are specific and relevant and that they are not too obscure. If a hashtag does not have any current posts, it is unlikely your followers will find it on their own.
Less is more. While many people on social media love to use as many hashtags as possible, it looks spammy, so try to avoid overusing hashtags.
#NoOneWantsToReadASentenceWithNoSpaces. That hashtag was hard to read, right? People are not going to be looking up hashtags like this, at least not often. Skip these kinds of hashtags and stick to only a couple of words so that they are something people will lookup. When you do use a hashtag with multiple words, capitalize each one to make it easier to read.
The Benefits of Hashtags
There are a number of benefits that a brand can enjoy when they correctly use hashtags.
Increased engagement
When you include hashtags in your social media posts, you may be connecting your brand to an ongoing online conversation, especially if your brand is taking a stance on a social issue. Using hashtags can help boost your engagement by getting new comments, likes, shares, and new followers who discovered you because of the hashtags in your post.
Instagram and LinkedIn both allow people to follow specific hashtags, so someone who is into travel can follow #travel and see new posts right away from that. This is another way that using a hashtag can help you gain new followers and brand awareness.
Taking a stance on social issues
Causes and social issues tend to pick up hashtags quickly, and they are an easy way for anyone to show support or take a stance on a cause. By attaching a specific hashtag to a post, you are opening up your brand to have a dialogue with your followers, and you may gain followers because of your support for a specific cause.
Build your brand
Many companies will create a branded hashtag to help promote their business. They can also be made for specific promotions or hashtag contests. Before you create a hashtag, do some research to make sure it is not already being used.
This can help extend your reach, too, and spread brand awareness through your followers’ content.
Adding context to a post
A lengthy social media post is not always going to perform as well as something a little shorter, and if you are on Twitter, you only have 280 characters to say what you need to say. With that in mind, sometimes adding a hashtag to a post can add more context to your post than you have the space to add.
Using popular hashtags
It is crucial to keep in mind that just because a hashtag is popular does not mean you should use it. For example, the hashtag #business has almost 72 million posts on Instagram at the time of this writing. However, this is a vague hashtag that does not add much to your post, so it is one that you can leave out of your posts. If there are millions or billions of posts using a hashtag, they usually do not have a specific theme or industry, like #business, so it is a good idea to use these types of hashtags sparingly.
However, this does not mean you should ignore a hashtag just because it is overly popular. The daily hashtags, for example, are a good example of a popular hashtag that still has context that can be used for your business. #ThrowBackThursday is a huge hashtag that can still help you engage and find new followers.
Hashtags per network
Every social media platform has different ways to use hashtags and how many are recommended in a single post.
The optimal number of hashtags on Twitter is one or two, and they can be placed anywhere in your tweet. You can also add hashtags to your Twitter bio if there are specific hashtags linked to your brand.
Facebook, like Twitter, only suggests using up to two hashtags in a post. They can also be placed anywhere in your post or in the comments.
Hashtags are also used on Facebook to group content together in private Facebook groups by topics or themes.
Since the majority of Facebook’s profiles are kept private, it can be more challenging to track how well your hashtags are performing. You can monitor your hashtags by going to facebook.com/hashtag/KEYWORD, including the keyword in your hashtag to the end.
While you can use up to 30 hashtags on Instagram, the optimal number of hashtags is actually between five and 10. On Instagram, place the hashtags at the end of your caption. Some brands will put their hashtags in the first comment on their post, instead of in the caption itself, because Instagram’s algorithm will still pick them up. If you have less than 100,000 followers on Instagram, you are likely to see better reach if you put the hashtag in your captions, but if you have more than 100,000 followers, putting the hashtags in the first comment can get you better reach.
You can also add up to 10 hashtags to your Instagram Stories, and you can include some in your profile bio as well.
Conclusion
Using the right hashtags can sometimes be difficult, and finding the right ones can have some trial and error. If you need help optimizing your social media and hashtags, contact Seattle Digital Marketing today! Our experts can help optimize your social media posts to extend your reach.
