How To Use Hashtags Effectively To Market Your Business On Social Media?
In case you’re a business owner and have still not taken advantage of hashtags to promote your content on social media platforms, then frankly you’re missing out a lot when it comes to your overall audience reach. Or quite possibly, you may have come up with some good hashtags for your products and/or services, thereby thinking that they’re good enough and continue to use them on your social media posts. And that’s where most businesses fail to utilise the power of hashtags.
It should be noted that hashtags are not just a kind of social trend that you need to adopt. Hashtags should be used as a medium for communication with your customers and ultimately expanding your business via social media. Most businesses out there fail to understand this simple concept which is why in this article guide we’ll be going through some of the major tips that business owners need to keep in mind when using hashtags on social media.
Quick Fact: When Was The First Hashtag Used On Social Media?
It should be noted that Twitter was the first social media platform to generalize the use of hashtags. The first hashtag was used in the year 2007, on 23rd August, by a person named Chris Messina, on Twitter.
It was also the same year when the Apple iPhone was launched. Safe to say, 2007 was the year for technological and social media innovations.
Excellent Tips & Tricks For Using Hashtags Wisely
1. Avoid Overusing Hashtags
The biggest tip for using hashtags wisely would be to not use them too much. You should not mindlessly use hashtags on your social media posts, trying to caption every word. Instead, your aim should be to only hashtag the words that are significant in your post.
Moreover, you need to ensure that you use hashtags within the number limit set by the platform. For example, Instagram lets you use up to 30 different hashtags but most digital marketers advise not to use more than ten or eleven, for the best results.
2. Notice What Your Competitors Are Doing
Your competitors, most probably, are using hashtags on their social media posts. Therefore, your job would be to closely pay attention to what hashtags your competitors are using and how much audience following they’re garnering from their social media posts. Moreover, you should also take a closer peek at the number of hashtags they’re using on their posts.
Analyzing your competitors will not only make your marketing strategy more robust but also learn a lot of things in the process.
3. Try Using Different Types Of Hashtags
Using hashtags is like using SEO – you can either use short-tail (more competitive), long-tail (less competitive) or both. Similarly, with hashtags, you can choose to either go with the most trending ones, less trending ones or use a mixture of both. Using only popular or trending hashtags mean that your social media post will have greater competition from similar posts – which means that users might take less notice of your post (less visibility).
On the other hand, if you mix up your popular hashtags along with some lesser-known ones, then you can expect users to pick up your content more since the competition will be less (more visibility). Furthermore, if your post goes viral, it’ll be more visible on the other popular or trending hashtags. Following such a concept will make your content noticed not only inside niche communities but also popular/trending communities.
At the end of the day, hashtags, if used correctly, can prove to be a game-changer in your digital marketing strategy for social media. They’re quite the underrated feature that most business owners tend to overlook. Hopefully, with the above tips & tricks, you’ll be able to change your tactics for the better future.