Hashtags—strings of characters after the # symbol used on social media networks—have been around for ages, but are you using hashtags in social media marketing to their full potential?
Originally started on Twitter in 2007, hashtags have long been providing a way for people to group content together—and for businesses, they can provide a great way to get more eyes on your content marketing efforts. Below, we will look at some ways businesses can use hashtags in social media marketing to increase the amount of people who see and interact with their posts.
What’s the Purpose of Hashtags?
The main purpose of a hashtag is simply to group content together in one place. When users search a hashtag on a social media network, they are able to see all the posts that are connected to that tag in one list, making it easy to find content relevant to their interests. Hashtags used to just be used on Twitter, but now every major social media site has hashtagging capability.
What Hashtags Should I Use?
Getting creative with hashtags is one of the most fun parts of building your social posts! Using hashtags that are relevant to your industry is a must so the right people can find you. For example, for a local restaurant we might use the hashtags #charlestoneats #charlestonfoodies and #charlestonrestaurant, while for our own posts we’d use tags like #marketingagency, #creativeagency, etc. In general, it’s best to use hashtags that are highly specific, yet still popular. Pro tip: you can use the search function on social media sites to discover which hashtags have the most results before you get started.
How Many Hashtags Should I Use?
While Twitter forces people to tamp down their hashtag usage to only the most relevant strings thanks to their character limit, with other social networks, it can be difficult to know when to stop the string. In general, the best practice is to only use the number of hashtags that are actually relevant. If you think about hashtags as a way to aggregate similar posts, it makes sense that you will see the best results by only using hashtags that actually pertain to your post instead of simply maxing out your limit in the hopes that someone will find the content.
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