In a world where communication is mostly effectuated through social channels, hashtags become an important aspect that can improve the way people share, discover, and relate to content.
Whether you’re a business or a professional who’s running his own social media personal brand, hashtags can help you improve the reach and awareness of your message, grab the attention of interested prospects, and skyrocket the results of your digital marketing campaigns.
Hashtags are extensively used on Instagram and Twitter, but they tend to go well with the other popular social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
Why are Hashtags so Beneficial?
But why so much fuss about it? After all, it’s just a social media feature, right?
Wrong.
Hashtags are extremely beneficial to individuals who run businesses, who promote content, and who sell ideas. The main purpose of hashtags is to give social media content an organized structure and labeling process. The end purpose is traffic, engagement, and eventually sales.
Here are the main reasons why hashtags are so extremely beneficial for professionals and businesses:
- Hashtags help you keep your content’s structure organized
- Hashtags can start or spread hot and breaking news
- Hashtags help you effectively spread the word about an event
- Hashtags can help you test various concepts, ideas, and topics
- Hashtags serve as good metrics for business and social media analytics
- The right hashtags will put your social media content in front of the right audience
- Hashtags help you improve your brand’s image and reputation
- Branded hashtags are able to solidify your positioning in your niche marketplace
- Hashtags that go viral will generate direct and immediate improvements in your business performance.
Most Popular Hashtags
The title of this post shouldn’t give the impression that the content inside is able to deliver the “key” to hashtagging success or the “magic pill” that you can swallow and become successful.
In fact, the ten most popular hashtags in the world should serve as points of reference. Of course, if you want to, you can use them directly by placing them in your posts. Bear in mind that this technique will not bring you the results you crave.
What you can do is analyze, study, and dissect each of them to discover what made them become so popular and viral. Here they go:
- #love – a strong state of being, emotion, and common interest
- #instagood – serves as the “very best of…camera captures/experiences/foods, etc”
- #photooftheday – a remarkable image that stands out from the crowd
- #fashion – needs no explanation
- #beautiful – one of the strongest and most common positive adjectives
- #happy – again, another state of being – the state of happiness
- #cute – similar to beautiful, a common describing adjective
- #tbt – stands for Throwback Tuesday, and indicates an old thought, idea, or event
- #like4like – “you like my post, and I’ll like yours”
- #followme – basic CTA (call-to-action) for prospects to become followers
Tips to Improve Your Hashtagging
Obviously, the post can’t end without me leaving you with some insightful tips and tricks on how to improve your hashtagging game. Here they are:
Learn to Leverage Trending Hashtags
You can identify trending hashtags by using various free Instagram tools. You can then identify the ones that have a close link with any of your posts and use them to boost the traffic and engagement.
Keep Hashtags Relevant to Content and Target Audience
Keep your hashtags relevant!
For example, if a student seeks to buy a custom essay, he would typically search for #customessay, #buyessay, or #buycustomessay. If he seeks more, perhaps custom essay papers, his search will look different.
When you write a hashtag, try to be as specific as possible. The more specific and relevant hashtags the more relevant prospects will reach your page.
Don’t Use Too Many or Too Few Hashtags
Every social media network has different hashtagging practices. On Instagram, you generally post more hashtags than you do on Facebook or Twitter. The easy tip would be to learn how each social channel treats hashtags and how users prefer it and then simply adapt. Here’s a great educational resource that should help you get started.
Create a Branded Hashtag
You can create your own hashtag, a unique type of hashtag that is associated only with your brand’s name, culture, and image. For example, Nike’s #justdoit was simple – they only had to use their branded tagline to create a strongly branded hashtag for social channels.
Takeaways
Now that you’ve discovered the true importance of hashtags, the most popular hashtags at the moment, and the strategies to take your hashtagging game to the next level, it’s time to take action.
Simply put, you’ll never improve your “game” if you’re constantly avoiding the practice. Even if you start small and go slowly, you’ll be able to learn from your experiences and generate real change in results. What are you waiting for? Get on to it!
Author Bio:
Sharon is marketing specialist and blogger from Manchester, UK. When she has a minute, she loves to share a few of her thoughts about marketing, writing and blogging with you. Currently, she is working as a marketer at essay writers service . You could follow Sharon on Facebook.
