Do’s and Don’ts of #hashtag for social media marketing

What is #hashtag? As you already know,

Hashtag is “a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign (#), used on social media websites and applications, especially Twitter, to identify messages on a specific topic.”

The first hashtag was posted by Chris Messina on 24th August 2007.

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— Chris Messina (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

Hashtags were then adopted by other leading social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and more. Now, hashtags are everywhere! Anyone who clicks on a hashtag or searches for it will find meaningful information with all the posts tagged with it.

Reasons to use HASHTAGS

Why do people use hashtags? There are a few of various reasons.

1. To make your post more discoverable and get more engagement

A study says that posts with at least one hashtag can get average 12.6% more engagement.

Anyone who clicks on a hashtag or searches for it will find meaningful information with all the posts tagged with it.

This way an individual who is not your fan or follower can find your content. Hashtags help to draw attention to your posts and encourage interactions.

2. Hashtags promote relevant content from other people and businesses

You can scan through which hashtags your favourite influencers are using, and find it to be both popular and highly relevant to your audience. Once you find good hashtags then you can use them on your post to expand your discoverability.

You can also find hashtags on Hashtagify.me. It is a tool to search for the popular and trending hashtags.

3. To run a marketing campaign effectively

#ShareACoke is a remarkable hashtag campaign by Coca-cola. It is still known to be extremely effective to the audience. It is a campaign that allows customers to print their name on Coca-cola bottle labels, so that they can order their personalized Coke. After a celebrity, Scott Lake, who was given a bottle with his name tweeted with a hashtag, a large number of people got encouraged to share their experiences and stories on social media platforms with the hashtag #ShareACoke. Within six months of launching, there were 330 million impressions on Twitter, with nearly 170,000 tweets from 160,000 fans.

A unique hashtag related to a strong campaign can give the audience a way to interact with each other and boost it more effectively.

Now that we know how useful hashtags are, here are some tips for you to help your social media marketing to success through the use of hashtags.

First of all, there are some simple rules to use #hashtags.

Rules

• # symbol before a keyword
• No space and punctuation

Now that we have covered that, let’s get into the main topic.

DO’s

Put an appropriate number of hashtags on every social media platform.
Although there are various theories, every social media has the best number of hashtags.

1. Facebook / Twitter: 1-2 hashtags per post / tweet
2. Pinterest / Google+: 2-3 hashtags per pin / post
3. Instagram: 10-11 hashtags

You’d be better off not to post the same contents on every social media. If you want to put more hashtags on social media, be careful! The limit of Instagram is up to 30 total and Facebook is around 25 (It’s all up to the content.)

Keep it readable

Hashtags should be short and sweet. Hashtags including multiple words lack readability. If you use multiple words in a hashtag, you’d better use Capital.

For example, #howtousehashtagcorrectly and #HowToUseHashtagCorrectly will both bring back the same results.

However, the one with the capital letters allows the audience to read it more easily.

Be careful with the capitalisation.

Although I mentioned using capitals in the preceding paragraph, you should be careful with how you use the capitals.

When Margaret Thatcher, the first female British Prime Minister passed, people use #nowthatchersdead. It meant “Now Thatcher’s dead” but a lot of people misunderstood as “Now that Cher’s dead”. (Cher is an American singer and actress)

You should consider whether your hashtag doesn’t have different meaning before publishing it for the world to see.

Don’ts

Don’t choose broad hashtags

Broad hashtags have a high volume of searches, but sometimes they are too broad to reach your target audience. “#marketing” is posted over 23,000,000 times on Instagram so that your post with #marketing may live in obscurity. Also, don’t use super specific hashtags that no one will search for.

Don’t use irrelevant hashtags to the contents

Using irrelevant hashtags is sometimes considered spam and displeases many people. No matter how popular a hashtag is, and looks promising to reach a lot of audiences, it may become more of a disadvantage than advantage.

Conclusion

Finding the proper hashtags for each social media may take some time, but it is certainly worth trying. Effective hashtags and strategies will help you to increase visibility across all social media platforms, as well as, assist you in reaching your potential customers and grow your brand.