We live in an era where almost all social media channels have hashtags. In fact, a lot of businesses and brands that run a successful campaign used hashtags.
Hashtags are used by businesses for many reasons. It can be either used to market new campaigns or products, run contests, and competitions or simply to connect a brand to a trending item or story.
Also, the best thing about running these hashtag campaigns is that it is economical and free. So the more time and effort that you spend on these hashtag campaigns, the greater the rewards will be.
In this post, we will walk you through the six steps on how to measure your hashtag campaign ROI.
Research Your Brand and Competitors
You need to know the position of your brand across various social media platforms. This includes knowing how powerful your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other effective mediums.
Who are the people talking about your brand and what is its context? What kind of responses are you receiving from these people? What is the type of keywords that could be related to your brand?
Those are the few questions that you need to answer before you could officially start your hashtag campaign.
Also, do the following:
- Measure your brand’s current influence: Use this data for your post-campaign analysis.
- Make a list of brand-related keywords: Look for these keywords on the social media platform which you want to start your campaign. By knowing these keywords, you could easily come up with relevant concepts, copies, and hashtags for your campaign.
Define Your Campaign Goal
Before you come up with your content and campaign strategy, you first need to know the goals of your hashtag campaign.
As posted on Voy Media Facebook Advertising Company, “Hashtags, stories, and posts are a few of the organic ways to connect with an audience. It puts content out and puts in front of the right people who are searching for this during their day-to-day.”
Defining your campaign goal before anything else is imperative. That’s because you could easily get caught with the process along the way, at a point wherein your metrics and KPIs become unclear.
Set Metrics to Measure
After defining your goals, the next step is to match these with actual metrics or behaviors that you can measure.
For instance, include influence metrics like your existing followers, contributors, and sources. This will give you important information such as your reach, impressions, contributors, and so on.
Find the Right KPI Tool
If you already singled out the metrics that you want to focus on, you need to find the right tools that help you capture these metrics, and then start measuring.
Find the right tools that will help you take these metrics. A lot of times, most social media platforms already offer these metrics. But if it is not the case, then you need to make use of third-party apps and tools.
Hashtagify: It is a free tool that helps you discover popular hashtags, the influencers who are using those hashtags, and usage trends.
Planning and choosing the right tools before you start your campaign will help you accessing important information during and after the campaign.
Monitor and Report
The next step that you need to do is monitor and report your results. You can make your initial findings to set as a baseline for your measurements in the future.
Now, ask yourself these questions:
- Did these numbers compare to what you expected?
- How did these measure up to related products and your competitor’s campaigns?
One of the advantages of social media analytics is that it is easy to run reports about your competitors, and then see what they are doing.
Also, do not forget to track everything. Have a detailed schedule on which Tweet, Facebook posts, or Instagram updates will include that hashtag.
Review and Adjust
Finally, review everything and make necessary adjustments.
Ask yourself how are the metrics doing. Was there anything that you’ve missed out?
Know what else can you improve, make changes, and measure some again. Check back with the goals you have initially set, and see to it that your new metrics are addressing those goals.
Let’s say that you have already started running your hashtag campaign on social media. Is it making the kind of impact that you wanted in the first place? Is it meeting your company’s goals?
On the other hand, avoid posting a hashtag too frequently. Brevity is key here. Posting too many hashtags can turn off most of your followers, or make you look too desperate.
Plan out the specific number of hashtags that you are going to use, as well as when you will be using it. Then, track its momentum throughout three, six, and twelve months.
Remember that monitoring and measuring your campaigns regularly is crucial. You need to have a trustworthy analytics that is consistent in helping you track your success on various social media platforms.
Over to You
Running a hashtag campaign is an excellent way to track conversations about companies, events, and brands.
Users could easily follow along with the conversation and make discussions. As a result, brands, digital marketers, and organizers can easily generate buzz around their event, service, or new product line.
Moreover, an excellent hashtag will help you easily spread the message about your brand, company, or product far beyond your usual audience.
Now, it is time to go out there, introduce, and start building traction with your hashtags! Follow these steps and you are well on your way to creating a successful hashtag campaign.
Author Bio:
Kevin Urrutia is the founder of Voy Media, a Facebook Ads Agency based in New York. He helps businesses maximize the benefits of Facebook Advertising, leading to a dramatic improvement in sales, while pushing down costs. Voy Media thoroughly studies each client, and comes up with tailor-fit solutions to bring about the best results.
