Using hashtags effectively is essential for any business on social media to increase engagement. Hashtags are an integral part of social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and others. so we can say in today’s social media world, hashtags are a given.
As we all know, hashtags are used to categorize posts and images, relate to trending topics, and even market our products. By using hashtags effectively, you can increase traffic to your website, promote your business, products, and promotions for free and gain traction for your business. In that way we can say hashtags increase engagement on any platform!
Here are some insights about hashtags and how they can help to increase engagement on your social media posts if you’re still having question about it.
Should we have a hashtag strategy?
Now that we know what hashtag is, let’s explore how they can benefit businesses and why should we hashtag strategy for our marketing.
A number of studies have shown that posts with hashtags receive significantly more likes, shares, and engagement compared to those without. When researching hashtags for your post, make sure to choose those that are most effective for the topic.
A hashtag strategy is when we use one or more hashtags to track the public’s reaction to a campaign. It can be a big deal for some brands, like McDonald’s, who launched the #McDStories social media campaign in 2013.
It can also be a good way to promote your content, as well as get people talking about you and the brand.
A hashtag strategy is not just an easy way of being seen on social media – it also helps us know what our target audience is talking about, so that we can adjust our strategy accordingly.
How to find the best hashtags to increase engagement?!
Successful hashtags resonate with your audience and connect with them enough to get them to use them. Here are some hashtag best practices to help you make the most of your hashtags:
- Think about the platform the target audience will be using. Facebook does not work well with certain hashtags, but Twitter does. Using too many hashtags is also a concern. It has been found that Instagram posts with 11+ hashtags get the most interaction. The engagement rate for Twitter posts with more than two hashtags drops by 17% compared to posts with only two tags. When curating hashtags, keep in mind your target social platform.
- Relevant, memorable, and unique hashtags are effective. A hashtag should also be capitalized in order to make it easier for users to understand what it’s saying.
- It is a good idea to think about what your hashtag phrase might look like to an outside observer before posting it. When you put together the hashtag phrase without spaces, it will spell out different words. Scrap that phrase and start over. You risk becoming an infamous social media fail if you fail to explain the meaning of the hashtag clearly.
- Your hashtag should not exceed a few words in length. Long and difficult-to-read tags should be avoided in order to catch users’ attention quickly.
Purpose of hashtags are the most important thing, you should pay attention to. By using these four steps, you can reach your hashtag’s goal.
How hashtags increase engagement on social media?
What is the point of hashtags for brands? Using hashtags on Instagram has a number of advantages that one of them is increase engagement! The benefits of using them are many, including getting your content in front of a larger audience, raising brand awareness, targeting a very specific demographic, boosting SEO, and taking advantage of hot trends. So HashtagMark wants to tell you how hashtags do so:
1. Content research
You can use hashtags to research different content ideas, just as you would with SEO keyword research. Say you are interested in increasing your share of voice in the #bestseafoods hashtag, it’s rather difficult, since the hashtag has more than 4 million posts.
2. Interacts with the audience
Utilizing and encouraging branded hashtags is another way to engage your audience. Posts tagged in feeds are stored in search results, while posts tagged in stories are stored for the lifetime of the story. Consider hashtags as an additional means of reaching and engaging your customers.
3. IRL and digital campaigns are linked
There’s a good chance you’ll see a hashtag in a retail marketing campaign these days. Hashtags provide a way to connect digital and in-person campaigns, whether they’re used as a general brand hashtag or a campaign hashtag.
4. Analyzing competitors
In your market, what is the amount of digital space occupied by your competitors? In your market, what is the amount of digital space occupied by your competitors? You are likely to have overlapping hashtags with your competitors, especially if they are industry- and location-specific.
Ideally, those hashtag search results would be dominated by your posts and those that your customers have tagged. Using your relevant hashtags can also provide inspiration for your content and provide insight into where your brand might be lacking compared to competitors.
5. Exposes and discovers more
In terms of exposure and discoverability, hashtags are primarily used to increase exposure. Instagram displays a gallery of top posts and most recent posts that use a specific hashtag when you click on it.
You can then browse all the related posts from there, making hashtags a great way to find accounts to follow if you are interested in a particular topic. Therefore, if you use the right and most relevant hashtags for your brand, others will be able to find the posts if they search on that hashtag.
Brand advocacy can be achieved by using branded hashtags to share your audience’s experiences with your products.
So what we are trying to say is brand exposure is enhanced by hashtags .If you click through one post in the search results, you will find many more similar ones.
Using hashtags to boost social engagement
Building a community around your brand is easy with hashtags when you use them to boost social engagement with your business. As a result, you encourage your customers to engage with your business and, at the same time, connect with new customers as well. But if you think finding the right hashtags to gain more audiences for this purpose is hard, take a look at free hashtag generator for Instagram.
In order to boost social engagement through hashtag usage, you can implement the following strategies:
- Your social media pages will benefit from hashtags if you use them to boost social engagement, and reach a larger audience. You can create hashtags that engage users and have them enjoying your brand with creative puns or play on words relating in some way to your core message or motto. Besides extending the hashtag’s reach, it also enhances your business’s branding.
- Trending hashtags should be identified and incorporated. There are times when using hashtags that already exist is the best strategy. You can extend the reach of each post beyond your subscribers by identifying trending hashtags on various social media platforms. To do so you can use e.g. hashtag generator tool for Twitter.
- Make your hashtag actionable by using actionable language. These hashtags include a direct call to action (CTA) to encourage participants to share their own stories and images online with the corresponding actionable hashtag. It is proven to be an effective way of increasing audience engagement, going viral, and landing on the trending hashtag list across multiple platforms.
How to use hashtags on social media?
You better know how to use hashtags on social media in order to increase your engagement. There are slightly different best practices for hashtags on each platform. The following hashtag rules are also common across most platforms:
- There must be one word in a hashtag
- There can be no spaces
- It is okay to use numbers
- The use of special characters is prohibited
In summary, hashtags can help you boost your business in several different ways. Your target audience will be easier to reach and your page engagement can be increased more than ever, and your business will grow as a result.
So it is possible to gain a lot of benefits from hashtags when you use them strategically.
