Social media possesses a plethora of tools and auxiliary means that enable any brand, project, or content creator to embark on marketing and reach their target audience effectively.
One of the most powerful tools offered by social media is the "hashtag." It significantly aids in building brand awareness and reaching new customers.
In this article, we will provide a comprehensive explanation of what hashtags are, their types, the importance of using them for brands and projects, and the best practices for utilizing hashtags on popular social media platforms.
We will also discuss essential tips to follow when using hashtags. Let's start by understanding the concept of hashtags and how to write them.
What Does a Hashtag Mean?
Hashtags, also known as tags or hashtags, are keywords that indicate a specific topic or category of content that attracts users' attention on social media. They are preceded by the "#" symbol.
They assist social media users in swiftly finding information about topics of interest through the search feature. When clicking on a hashtag, all posts related to the keyword (i.e., the hashtag) are displayed.
If you offer services, products, or content on social media, you can effectively use this method by selecting prominent keywords that align with your content. This will attract your audience's attention and provide them with information about your activities, offerings, and increase awareness of your brand.
For instance, if you work in the field of courses and training, you can include key hashtags in your content like "#courses #training_courses #free_courses #onlinecourses #freecourses."
How to Write Hashtags
When writing hashtags, it is customary to place the "#" symbol before the keyword. It is important not to have spaces between words. In the case of a multi-word keyword, hashtags must be written without spaces, like #digitalmarketingtips, or you can use an underscore (_) between the words, such as #digital_marketing_tips.
Types of Hashtags
Below are the types of hashtags you can use to enhance your online presence:
1. General Hashtags
These
are commonly used hashtags that are not specific to any particular
content on social media. They are sometimes necessary as they create
awareness about your brand among a large number of users if they find
your content useful or interesting.
However, it is not advisable to use them unless you have a large brand or millions of followers in your field.
2. Brand Hashtags
These
hashtags are directly related to your business activities. They may
include your brand name, slogan, company message, the names of your key
products, or your upcoming marketing campaigns. Brand hashtags act as a
signature for your project on social media.
The more people
become familiar with your brand, the more they will engage with your
content. Brand hashtags facilitate organizing and promoting your
project's content and reaching your target customers.
When using
this type of hashtag, it is best to keep it simple and concise,
consisting of at most two words to make it easily memorable for the
audience.
3. Content Hashtags
Content
hashtags include the most relevant keywords and topics related to your
service or product. For example, if you offer marketing services,
relevant hashtags may include #digitalmarketing, #marketingstrategies,
#socialmediamarketing.
It is essential to use the most specific
hashtags. For instance, you can use #socialmediamarketing instead of
#digitalmarketing if your post focuses on social media marketing
specifically.
4. Trend Hashtags
A trend refers to a popular current topic or event that engages the audience on social media. Smart brands take advantage of these trends in their marketing campaigns by using relevant keywords associated with the event, such as #BlackFriday or #2023.By participating in trend hashtags and creating content that aligns with the trend, you can gain new customers and increase engagement with your content.
Why Should You Use Hashtags for Marketing Your Business?
Regardless of your objective in using social media as a marketing strategy for your business, whether it's gaining followers, increasing sales, or enhancing brand awareness, hashtags are crucial elements that you must incorporate into your marketing efforts.
Hashtags have become widely used and popular among business owners and the general social media audience.
Let's take a look at some aspects that highlight the importance of using hashtags in marketing:
1. By using popular hashtags in your industry, you can expand your business reach and attract a larger audience interested in what your brand offers. These hashtags enable users to find you through searches or categorization tags.
2. Hashtags help boost your online presence, enhance digital engagement with your audience, and facilitate entry into new markets in different countries.
3. You can promote advertising campaigns using hashtags, encouraging your audience to follow these hashtags to learn about the latest offers, discounts, or gifts provided by your brand.
4. Public marketing contests can be launched using hashtags, urging the audience to interact with the hashtag and share it with their friends, like #PlayAndWin #gamingtime.
5. Hashtags allow you to measure the performance of your advertising campaigns, analyzing the audience's interaction with the hashtags used.
6. Tags assist social media platforms' algorithms in recognizing your content and identifying the audience interested in your offerings, thereby increasing your visibility to them.
7. Hashtags also help your audience find content that piques their interest. When users follow a specific hashtag link, it increases the reach of your content. This enables you to understand your audience's behavior towards your brand.
8. When users talk about your brand on social media, whether positively or negatively, they usually use your brand's hashtag. Consequently, you can always search for your brand's hashtag on social media to know what users are saying about you.
Mechanisms to Find the Most Effective Hashtags in Your Field
Several tools can help you explore the best hashtags used in your industry, which will undoubtedly have a significant impact on your brand and help your audience find you. Here are some of these mechanisms:
1. Analyzing Competitors
Knowing what your competitors are doing, the type of their content, and the hashtags they use will help you discover the best hashtags for your brand as well.
A best practice for achieving optimal results is to analyze these hashtags to determine their relevance and effectiveness. Make sure they are not fake or banned from use.
Several websites assist you in competitor analysis on social media, such as:
2. Identifying Influencers
A crucial mechanism for discovering the best hashtags is to know the names of influencers in your industry and identify the hashtags they use to attract their followers.
Fortunately, there are websites that help you identify the top influencers in your field, such as Social Blade. Using this website, you can specify the social media platform on which you want your business to be present and search for the top influencers in that platform.
The results will be ranked based on the audience's engagement with the influencers, the quality of their content, and the purpose of their presentations.
You can then visit their pages on social media platforms and discover the most used hashtags to reach their audience. It's advisable to analyze these hashtags and choose the most effective ones.
3. Utilizing the Search Feature on Each Platform
One common method to find hashtags is to search on the targeted social media platform for the most used hashtags related to your industry.
For example, Twitter offers the "Explore" feature, where you can search for the most frequently used hashtags in your field, and it will suggest other relevant hashtags that you can use in your content.
4. Using Hashtag Generation Tools
These are websites that offer suggestions for the best hashtags in your industry. Some of these tools include:
a) All Hashtag
One of the most robust websites that suggest dozens of hashtags related to your industry. By simply entering a single word that represents your industry, services, or field, it provides you with the closest keywords that the audience uses.
This tool also provides other features to assist you in selecting the best hashtag, such as:
- Hashtag Counter: A tool that counts the keywords used as hashtags in your available text.
- Hashtag Analytics: This tool helps you analyze the hashtags you believe are best for use, providing you with analytical information to guide your choice of the best tag.
- Hashtag Creator: This tool allows you to create hashtags specifically for your brand, simply by typing your brand name, and it suggests the best keywords.
b) Hashtagify.me
This is a significant website that helps you discover the most relevant hashtags for what you offer on various platforms, especially on Twitter and Instagram. It also displays popular general hashtags.
For example, if you type the closest keyword to the content you offer, such as "life coach," the website provides you with the best related suggestions used by competitors in the field, such as #training #motivation #success #inspiration #life #work #lifecoaching #motivation.
One of the advantages of this website is that it offers a hashtag analysis tool to gather important data about the selected keywords. However, this feature is paid, and you can try it once for free.
c) Top Hashtags
This website is entirely free and is one of the fantastic tools for efficiently using hashtags. The site includes three sub-tools:
- Top Hashtags: This tool enables you to identify the most commonly used hashtags on social media platforms.
- Random Hashtags: This tool displays the most used hashtags on social media, but in a random manner, to assist you in brainstorming and discovering new ideas. When you click the refresh button, the list will change.
- Convert Hashtags: Through this tool, any word you type will be converted into a hashtag. It also provides an analysis of the hashtag's usage.
Additionally, you can search for any word related to your industry on the website, and it will display a list of the most important and popular hashtags related to that word and its derivatives. Moreover, the list includes the usage rate of each hashtag.
There are many other websites that serve the same purpose, enabling you to generate numerous keywords related to your industry and use them in your content.
How to Use Hashtags on Social Media Professionally?
Most social media platforms allow the use of hashtags in their content, but the way they are used varies from one platform to another. However, the ultimate goal of using hashtags on all platforms is the same: to attract followers, engage the audience, and enhance the online presence of your brand.
1. How to Use Hashtags on Twitter
For Twitter, one of the best practices is to use a limited number of hashtags since the maximum character limit for a tweet is 280 characters. Some users use keywords within the text itself as a hashtag by adding the "#" symbol before the word, whether at the beginning, middle, or end of the tweet. Hashtags can also be used in replies and retweets.
However, when launching advertising campaigns on Twitter, it's not recommended to use hashtags. Ads without hashtags receive a 24% higher click-through rate compared to those with hashtags.
2. How to Use Hashtags on LinkedIn
Unlike Twitter, LinkedIn does not allow the placement of hashtags before keywords in the text. Instead, hashtags are added at the end of the text, and you can use a larger number of hashtags, up to 10 per post.
LinkedIn provides the feature of adding hashtags, which offers you numerous options and suggestions for words you can use as hashtags. As soon as you start typing the first letters of the words you want to include, the suggestions appear.
3. How to Use Hashtags on Facebook
Contrary to all platforms, Facebook does not prefer the use of a large number of hashtags. The suitable maximum is 2 to 3 hashtags, as using a higher number may reduce audience engagement. Often, hashtags used on Facebook include the brand name or its specific slogan.
4. How to Use Hashtags on Instagram
On Instagram, it is recommended to use a larger number of hashtags. Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post but not less than 15.
One of Instagram's advantages is that when you search for a specific hashtag, it displays the number of posts associated with it. Users can also follow a particular hashtag, and these hashtags are categorized based on the most shared and used, as well as the latest.
It is common to use hashtags on Instagram for videos, images, stories, and highlights.
As a best practice, use hashtags at the end of the image caption and space them away from the main content using multiple lines. You can use points, commas, or other symbols to make the image caption more visually appealing and easily understandable for readers.
This will increase the chances of your post reaching people interested in your content. You can also include a few hashtags in the captions of your published stories.
You can add tags to your Instagram bio that are relevant to your industry and associated with your brand name.
4. How to Use Hashtags on TikTok
TikTok allows the use of hashtags on published videos. Often, general hashtags related to specific topics such as #music, #video, #explore, and #trend are used.
Important Tips for Using Hashtags Correctly and Effectively:
1. Create hashtags with your brand or project name, keeping them short, meaningful, and relevant to what you offer. Use clear and closely related keywords, opting for concise words that convey a clear meaning.
2. Utilize hashtag generation tools as they can greatly assist in extracting the most relevant keywords. Some tools even help you analyze the performance of each hashtag, enabling you to choose the best ones for better results.
3. Sometimes, the impact is not about the quantity of hashtags used. Two or three well-chosen hashtags can have a greater effect than using a large number of them.
4. Avoid using general hashtags that are not properly related to your field or what you offer.
5. Thoroughly study your competitors to identify the most used and impactful hashtags that attract the audience well.
6. Encourage your audience to use and share your hashtags, incentivizing them with offers and discounts to engage with you.
7. Create valuable content for your customers that addresses their problems and offers them advice. This will encourage them to follow your hashtag to stay updated on what you offer.
8. Keep track of trending topics related to your industry and try to leverage them by writing suitable content, providing attractive offers, and encouraging participation and interaction from your followers.
9. Avoid using fake hashtags, ones that have been banned, or generic hashtags that are unrelated to your field.
Conclusion
Hashtags play a vital role in effectively enhancing an online presence across various social media platforms. The use of hashtags varies depending on the platform, and it is essential to understand the best practices for each. Hashtags can be categorized into general, brand-specific, content-related, and trending hashtags, each serving a distinct purpose in reaching and engaging with the target audience. To maximize the impact of hashtags, it is crucial to create concise, relevant, and brand-focused tags. Utilizing hashtag generation tools and studying competitors can also aid in identifying the most effective keywords. By providing valuable content, encouraging audience participation, and staying away from irrelevant hashtags, businesses can harness the power of hashtags for successful online marketing.
