For businesses using social media, nothing seems to cause more confusion than hashtags. For a beginner, social media can be hard to get your mind wrapped around. Throw in hashtags, and varied languages & posts per platform, and you can have a mess on your hands.
Have no fear. After this post, you’ll not only be able to understand hashtags, but you’ll be able to research and use them effectively as well.
Why Use Them?
The main purpose of hashtags is to aggregate similar content together and make it easier to find. With so many conversations happening on social media, all day, every day, it’s easy for content to get lost. For example, a tweet tends to only have a lifetime of 20 to 30 minutes, which is why sharing content multiple times throughout the day on Twitter is paramount to catching different parts of your audience. After all, once you’ve tweeted it, the clock starts ticking and it’s only a matter of time before it gets lost in the feed.
This is why companies sometimes create their own hashtags, and oftentimes, you’ll see hashtags dedicated to specific events (like webinars), or general topics – it’s all to bring similar content together, avoid getting lost in the shuffle, and, ultimately, to reach a wider audience. For example, if your target is interested in ecommerce and you share an article or blog post about ecommerce, throwing #ecommerce into the tweet will help more of your audience see that content; plus, it helps extend the lifetime of that tweet, simply because people can search for hashtags they’re interested in.
Platforms Matter
When a lot of businesses start using social media, they tend to share the same thing across all platforms in the interest of saving time. But, oftentimes, this practice of just spraying the same thing across channels ends up hurting you. Each platform has its own language and standards of posting. Not to mention, your audience and their interests may vary from platform to platform – you need to listen and cater to each audience’s needs.
On top of that, you also need to pay attention to the capabilities of each platform. For example, LinkedIn and Pinterest do not support hashtags, and using them on those platforms, not only makes it look like you don’t know what you’re doing, but can also hurt you in terms of your posts showing up in your audience’s feeds. In their most recent webinar on The Art of Social, Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick pointed out that using hashtags on Pinterest can hurt you due to the way their algorithm is set up.
On the other hand, Instagram supports up to 30 hashtags in their posts. Hashtags on Tumblr and Instagram do still serve to aggregate similar content and reach a wider audience, but they’re also typically used for witty sayings or responses as well. On Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, however, the best practice is to include only 2 or 3 relevant hashtags interspersed naturally throughout the content; on those platforms, too many hashtags tends to detract from the content you post and often makes it come across as “spammy.”
Do Your Research
Aside from keeping them relevant, the most important thing is to use hashtags intelligently – you need to do your research. The thing some businesses don’t seem to get about social media is that the conversations are already happening – you are not running the conversations about your brand, the public is and social media is just your means to participate in it.
You may think you have the most amazing, creative hashtag in the world, and you might, but it may already be in use; unless you do your research on desired hashtags before use, you won’t know what kind of conversations have been happening with that hashtag already. If you jump in without looking into it or just jump onto trending hashtags without research, your brand could end up being one the famous Twitter fails – definitely not the kind of conversation you wanted to start.
For the best results, first write your hashtag out on paper, both a capitalized version and one that’s all lowercase. Remember, once you start using a hashtag, if others pick up using it, you lose control over what happens at that point – they may capitalize each word, they may not. Either way, your hashtag needs to read appropriately and isn’t taking on an unintended meaning. One of the easiest ways to test this is simply to have a few people read your hashtag out loud. After writing it out and hearing it, you’ll know whether or not it’s worth researching for use.
The easiest way to see what people are saying for a hashtag is to go to Twitter and use the search bar for your #hashtag to bring up recent conversations. From there, you’ll gain some insights on the tone of the conversations happening around your chosen hashtag. To see how it has been used in the past, whether or not people are using it, and how often it’s being used, you can use Topsy.com. This is particularly useful if you’re trying to identify the best hashtag for a topic; hashtags.org is another great resource. There, you can search your topic and see how often it’s been used in the last 24 hours as well as variations that might be a better fit. Once you’ve done your research, you can start using your hashtags knowing, at the very least, what you’re getting into.
People may pick it up, they may not; but, you’ll have made strides to reach more people and make your content live just a little longer on social. Stick to best practices and the language for each platform and you’ll be fine. If social media still makes you a little wary, don’t be afraid check out resources, sit back and listen, and look at examples of people doing it right for inspiration.