Guest Post by Jedda Cain
Twenty years earlier, if someone told you that it is possible to get your message across the globe using just a hashtag, you might have found that hard to believe. Well, we have seen what kind of impact #IceBucketChallenge or #BlackLivesMatter had on the society in the past few years. As a matter of fact, hashtags are one of the most powerful tools that we have in today’s digitized world. So, how exactly do the marketers use it to their advantage?
Well, even though hashtags are quite powerful, putting it with a random word or phrase does not deliver positive results. In fact, brands require a solid social media marketing strategy revolving around the use of hashtags to raise brand awareness as well as to boost their marketing campaigns. If you are a social media marketer, you may already be familiar with popular hashtags in the market, but that is not going to be enough. You may also need to learn about the unconventional hashtag tactics that are currently ruling the marketing space across various social media platforms.
#1. The Use of Branded Hashtags
While most of the marketers aim to gain a decent mileage using the popular hashtags which are trending in the market, there is a significant portion of the social media marketers who create their own slogans or keywords around specific marketing campaigns and use them as hashtags. Using your brand name as hashtags is a common practice, but there are only a few brands which have received positive results for using branded hashtags.
You must have heard about Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign where the brand imprinted common names on their pet bottles and cans, encouraging the customers to share the coke with a “John”, “Mike” or “Karen” they know, or with their “Friends”. As soon as the campaign hit the market, people started posting their pictures with the hashtag “#ShareaCoke”, tagging the person whose name they found on the bottle. It generated an organic promotion as people kept on doing the same, letting others know about the promotion.
#2. Conducting Hashtag Research
The concept of keyword research is already quite popular among the marketers. However, in today’s date, it makes more sense to conduct hashtag research before preparing a strategy for a social media campaign. Smart social media marketers usually research hashtags via keyword analysis to learn the volume and frequency of the posts, containing the chosen hashtag.
Learning about the necessary hashtag metrics is not that difficult. You can get the analysis of a trending hashtag using the built-in tools in the social networking platform, or by using more accurate hashtag analytics like Hashtagify.me.
A social media marketer usually uses these tricks to find out which hashtags are being used by the users and the influencers. After locating the popular posts, marketers can join in the on-going conversation on social media and leverage the popularity of the post to promote their brand name or the social media campaigns.
#3. Using the Special Days and Celebrations to Advantage
If you have observed the use of hashtags on social media, you may have noticed that a certain number of hashtags gain a massive amount of mileage during the festive season or on a special day. For instance “#happyholidays” or “#happyeaster” remain on the top of most popular hashtags across social media platforms during Christmas or Easter, respectively. If you work for a brand that offers Australian assignment help, using “#stressfreeholiday” during the holiday season can deliver effective results.
It is easier for marketers to build social media campaigns around special days and celebrations as people naturally post updates using the relevant hashtags. You, as a social media marketer, have the option to build your campaign on those. A lot of brands use this trick to promote their campaigns. The hashtags used by retail companies (#ChristmasShopping and #HolidaySavings) and food chains (#HolidayEats and #ChirstmasDinner) gain significant popularity during Christmas.
#4. Partnering with the Influencers in the Industry
It may seem easier to run a social media campaign on a special day or during the festive season as the response from the public comes easy with time. However, marketers can gain a significant amount of response from the users on a regular day if they can manage to get a social media influencer to share a relevant post with the chosen hashtag. It can be more effective when the influencer belongs to the same industry as the brand that is running the campaign.
Approaching the social media influencer and convincing him or her to post on behalf of the brand are the toughest part of this trick. However, some influencers look forward to such collaboration since these activities also boost their reach. As a social media manager, it is your duty to know which individuals and groups have a significant fan following in your industry.
You can choose a popular persona from the entertainment industry to talk about assignment help services, but that is not going to look great if you are pushing a branded hashtag. Choosing someone, who often discusses about the significance of education in life, sounds more logical in this case. If it is done in the right way, it can improve the brand awareness and also boost the credibility of the brand.
#5. Having a Competitive Analysis
Social media marketing is a dynamic field, where one day you are leading the list of most popular hashtags while the next day, you may have it difficult to get near the leaderboard. This is why it seems like a smart move from the marketers to check out what the competitors are doing to stay on top in the competition. This can be achieved using competitive analysis, that too with the help of targeted hashtags.
A competitive analysis of the marketing efforts of the competitors can help you learn which hashtags they are using, the follower engagement around the posts, the campaigns associated with the chosen hashtags, and the reported outcomes. This kind of analysis allows the marketers to understand what kind of content is working in the industry and what is not. Using the collected data, you may also be able to come up with a new hashtag campaign for your brand.
Even though some of these hashtag tactics may sound unconventional, a lot of marketers are actually incorporating these tricks to improve the social media marketing output. If you are already practising some of these tactics to boost your social media campaign, you are already several steps ahead of your peers. However, if you learned about these tactics just now, it will be wiser if you find a way to incorporate these tricks into your social media marketing strategy.
Author Bio:
Jedda Cain is a social media marketer who is currently employed at an MNC. She is also associated with EssayAssignmentHelp where she deals with the problems faced by students and offers them the necessary essay writing help on request. She is also a guest writer at AllEssayWriter.
