Social media is one of the most impactful places to market your business. While social media will help you get your name out there and reach out to potential customers, most of the time, you will have to make extra efforts to ensure that your content reaches the right people.
One guaranteed way to improve the number of people seeing your content is by using hashtags. Hashtags help your target audience find your brand and let you answer their questions before they think to ask.
However, using hashtags is only successful after a learning curve. When not done correctly, your hashtags won’t find the right audience. If you are unsure why your hashtag game isn’t clicking, consider some of the following four methods for stepping your game up.
Do Your Research
Hashtags might seem like a few fun words at the end of your post to reach your audience, but they are far more complex than this single purpose. Using a handful of words, you think your target audience would search for is too much of a guessing game to be a successful marketing strategy.
One of the best ways to improve your hashtag game and succeed in digital marketing is simply through research. Your research begins with searching for any keyword–typically a more generic one–that suits your marketing purposes. Next, you can browse through the most popular posts with that hashtag and look into any other, more specific hashtags used on the post.
It would help to research any influencers with a similar audience to yours. Influencers know how to market themselves, and your brand might be able to learn a thing or two from studying how they implement their hashtag strategy. After identifying the foundational hashtags for your marketing, you can use online tools to determine similar hashtags that will benefit your campaign.
You should also seek tools to help you find hashtags within your brand’s specific niche market. Finally, when researching the best hashtags for your marketing content, you can use one of the many online platforms to find currently trending hashtags on different social media platforms: Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Use Alliterative Hashtags
You don’t want your hashtags to blend into the background of the plethora of other hashtags battling to reach the top of an oversaturated search page. Though you will end up using some hashtags common for marketing in your industry, you should mix your strategy and create your fun, unique hashtag. Alliteration is the best way to show off your brand voice and give your target audience something to remember. The catchier the hashtag, the easier it will be for your audience to remember and return to your brand in the future.
Alliteration for your hashtag means that each word will start with the same letter. While it might seem like a slight adjustment, alliteration can change the way people remember your brand and how positively they feel toward it. If you doubt that alliteration will work, don’t worry–plenty of examples prove the effectiveness of alliteration in your hashtags. Think “#TacoTuesday,” “#FlashbackFriday,” or “#ThrowbackThursday.” We’ve all heard of them and know that alliteration works, so why not try it with your content?
Use the Right Number of Hashtags
As you’re starting with hashtags to boost marketing campaigns, you might want to use every hashtag at your disposal. Choosing only a couple of hashtags feels impossible when there are so many options that your target audience might search for, so why not use as many as you can? Though this is a natural assumption in marketing, using too many hashtags might not benefit your content the way you’re hoping it will.
Instagram recommends only using between 3 to 5 hashtags on any post on their platform. Other platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook should follow similar patterns when you choose to market with them. As more people create social media accounts, hashtags become flooded with a plethora of content. Social media sites have begun encouraging fewer hashtags for better categorization and recommendations to their users to combat irrelevant hashtags or hashtags that don’t have anything to do with the post.
Many hashtags are overwhelmed with spam posts irrelevant to the subject matter. Similar to Instagram, Twitter recommends that users limit their hashtag usage. For Twitter, brands are advised not to use more than two hashtags in a post. Though multiple hashtags could help you appear in more searches, too many hashtags will make your content seem less credible, causing people to see your brand as pandering to audiences.
Know Where to Place Hashtags
How many hashtags you use isn’t the only thing you need to consider when making a post. Knowing where to place your hashtags throughout the post is just as important as any other strategy for upping your hashtag game. First, ensure that you are not putting any of your hashtags in the comments section of your post.
When it’s time to add hashtags to your post, you should consider the purpose behind each hashtag. For example, you can put hashtags at the beginning of your post if you want to emphasize your brand immediately. In contrast, you can include hashtags at the end of your post to provide additional context to your campaign. You may also consider placing hashtags in between words in your caption to emphasize a specific keyword.
However, while you can place hashtags in different parts of your caption, the cleanest way to do so is at the end of your post. Having multiple hashtags at the beginning or middle of your content might make readers turn away from your page. Having hashtags too early in the post makes it seem like nothing more than a marketing campaign without valuable content and information.
Additionally, it’s best to place hashtags at the end of your content because it makes your post look cleaner and comprehensible. Too many hashtags throughout the caption make it challenging to read and unappealing to many potential customers. Explain the purpose of your content first, then close your caption with effective hashtags.
Start Improving Your Hashtag Game
Stepping up your hashtag game is crucial to improving your digital marketing campaign's success and how effectively you reach your target audience. If you are unsure about your current digital marketing strategy, you should seek expert advice from services like Highway 9 Consulting.
Highway 9 Consulting is essential for any B2B company requiring strategies to improve its sales and marketing programs. Contact the experts at Highway 9 Consulting today to learn more about utilizing hashtags effectively in your upcoming marketing campaigns.
