The social media marketing era is at its peak. Nowadays, a business that lacks a social presence is similar to an author that hasn’t published his works. Essentially, without a social media presence, a brand will have a really hard time establishing its position in the marketplace.
Promoting your business on social media is one of the most effective ways to improve your brand’s awareness, reputation, and reach. The strategies that you can leverage to do market your business on social channels are endless. Because of such diversity, you must identify the methods that work best for your business.
Out of all the possible strategies, hashtag marketing seems to be a great choice for many successful brands.
What are hashtags?
You don’t have to be a marketer or entrepreneur to be familiar with hashtags. They’ve been here for a while, and they’ve been making quite a buzz during the last several years.
Nevertheless, hashtags are simply topics. Social media networks feature hashtags in order to help users and businesses organize and niche their content, allowing them to create categories.
Whenever a social media user searches for a specific hashtag, all the content leveraged by businesses and people will show up. See it as a sophisticated social media search engine – the main utility is that it helps people discover and explore topics of their interest.
There’s been a lot of talking concerning the usefulness of hashtags during the last several years. Businesses are starting to doubt the benefits that hashtags bring to their social media campaigns. Many Instagram influencers have stopped using hashtags in their content.
Nowadays, lots of marketers and digital entrepreneurs are wondering whether hashtags are still relevant in 2019.
The simple answer is yes. Hashtags are still helpful because nothing has officially changed. Wait. One thing has changed, and that is the competition. More and more businesses are building social presences while leveraging the power of hashtags.
For that reason, you need to step up your game and improve your hashtag marketing tactics immediately.
In today’s post, I’m going to outline all the reasons why hashtags are still important in 2019. Additionally, I’ll provide you with 4 insightful tips on how to improve the performance of your hashtags. Let’s begin.
Hashtags increase the organic reach of your content
When you post a social media update and add a few relevant hashtags that are based on targeted keywords, your organic reach immediately increases.
“Hashtags are very similar to the keywords you leverage in SEO campaigns. The only difference is that they’re the keywords that people search for using the social media search engine. The better you optimize them the higher the odds of people reaching them.” – John Brown, Marketing Manager at Paper Owl Reviews
Hashtags improve brand awareness
Brand awareness is a key factor that differentiates the popular brands from the less popular. By developing “branded hashtags”, which are unique hashtags that represent your business only, you are able to position your brand properly in the marketplace.
For example, Dove has leveraged many branded hashtags to improve its brand awareness among social audiences. Hashtags like #SpeakBeautiful and #InMySkin have generated amazing engagements that have not only inspired a lot of people but has also improved the loyalty of Dove’s consumers.
Hashtags help you reach out to specific target audiences
As I’ve already mentioned, hashtags are a great way to categorize your content. If you constantly post hashtags that are part of the same “family tree”, you’ll be able to reach relevant audiences that have something in common with your products and services. The more semantic keywords you leverage the higher the odds of capturing the attention of the target audience that you want.
Hashtags allow you to track your strategy performance and success
Hashtags are one good way of figuring out whether your social media marketing strategies are working effectively or not. As you develop branded hashtags and leverage other relevant and unique hashtags, you’ll be able to tell whether users are properly engaging with your ideas.
A custom dissertation writing service may leverage hashtags like #freeessays, #academicwriting, or #writemyassignment. Nevertheless, the same company will be able to track and analyze their hashtags performance by leveraging hashtags analytics tools. If the engagement is satisfying, it means that their strategy is effective. If it doesn’t, they’ll be aware that their keywords aren’t attractive and efficient.
Hashtags improve your click through rates
When you insert hashtags in your social media posts, you’re enhancing the message you want to send. Hashtags help users identify content that is relevant to their needs and problems, just as headlines do. If they’re combined, the click through rates performances of a campaign will improve.
Moreover, if users discover social media content with hashtags randomly (without searching for a particular hashtag),
Hashtags help you develop unique marketing strategies
Hashtags allow businesses to get creative on social media networks in various ways. First of all, by leveraging trending hashtags, a business can let its target market know that they’re up to speed with the latest industry updates and trends. Secondly, a branded hashtag that is well promoted has the potential to become viral.
#IceBucketChallenge is one of those viral hashtag marketing campaigns that has taken the world by storm. Another amazing hashtag marketing campaign was Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke campaign. Cokes with titles and names on them helped the company generate massive amounts of user-generated content.
Hashtags allow you to communicate easily
The purpose of a marketing campaign is to effectively deliver messages that reach people’s subconscious beliefs, desires, needs, and issues. That is what every successful brand is trying to do. Hashtags are effective tools that allow brands to deliver the “cherry on the pie”. A great piece of content that is accompanied by hashtags will enhance the message of the content that is being presented.
The more relevant hashtags you present on a post the more validation you provide that the content you feature is helpful, valuable, and relevant to a specific target audience.
Tips to Improve Your Hashtag Marketing Performance in 2019
The benefits of hashtags are still relevant in 2019. If you’re considering using them in your next social media campaigns, you should not hesitate to do so.
Of course, the way you choose to use hashtags in your social media campaigns matters. Many companies have no idea how to use hashtags effectively, so they’re automatically assuming that they aren’t useful.
Here are some useful tips and tricks on how to improve your hashtags efficiency:
Follow the best hashtag practices of each different social network
People and businesses post hashtags differently on each social network. For example, Twitter recommends the use of no more than three hashtags in one post. Instagram, on the other hand, is a social platform that is well known to encourage the posting of more than three hashtags. In fact, many brands and influencers are using more than 10 hashtags on their Instagram posts.
Facebook recommends the use of one or two hashtags per post. If you follow the guidelines, the networks are going to provide the maximum reach. If you don’t, they may limit the visibility of your posts.
Study successful influencers
Before you craft a hashtag strategy, pay attention to the most popular influencers that are frequently posting hashtags on the social media channel that you’re going to use.
If you’re planning to use hashtags on LinkedIn (for example), take a quick peek at the posts provided by the relevant influencers in your niche. Take their strategies into consideration, follow their style, and test your results.
Don’t use spaces in your hashtags
An obvious tip would be not to use any spaces in your hashtags. If you add a space after the “#”, the word you’re using after will not be counted as a hashtag.
Limit your posts to a couple of hashtags
Even though you may see a lot of people that post a lot of hashtags, you don’t really know if their hashtag strategy is working properly. For that reason, it is advised to limit your posts to a couple of hashtags. Test your performance using hashtag analytics tools and decide whether to optimize your strategy in the future.
Carefully choose your hashtags based on keywords
Before you integrate a new hashtag, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What is their intention while searching for a specific keyword? Do they want information? Guidance? Products? Depending on your answers, choose the right hashtags for the right posts.
Be unique with your hashtag choices
Lastly yet very importantly, do your best to stand out from the crowd. If you use unique hashtags, people are going to be tempted to click on your posts. Unique hashtags generate curiosity. Balance your unique hashtags with trending hashtags and you’ll achieve proper results!
Takeaways
As a final takeaway, hashtags are still relevant in 2019. By leveraging them effectively, you can make your content more discoverable, improve your organic traffic, and expand your brand’s awareness.
Keep in mind that the more unique and out-of-the-box your hashtag marketing campaigns are the better performances you’ll get. Use today’s justifications and tips and keep your hashtag marketing game strong!
Author Bio
John Trogdon works as a managing editor at www.a-writer.com. For 8
years he has been a successful writer and content creator. John is a
regular contributor to publications on writing, marketing and media.
Find John on Facebook www.facebook.com/john.trogdon.923> and LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com/in/john-trogdon-b95aa3192,
