The '#' is a very curious symbol with many names, like, a hash mark, number sign, pound sign, and octothorpe – this sounds like equipment for doctors. Anyway, what's in the name? What this sign, the hashtag, has done for digital marketing is nothing short of a wonder. The hashtag has assisted some of the best marketing campaigns to create global waves of product awareness. These hashtags have led to some of the most effective social movements, proving their effectiveness.
Hashtags are an effective way to project your content to the market. People share more than 95 million posts on Instagram in a day, and you certainly don’t want to miss out on this great opportunity. For this reason, we have come up with this article on how to use your Instagram Hashtags To Increase You Social Media Reach.
Hashtags are everywhere, from Twitter to Instagram, and they have become the essence of an effective social media marketing strategy. Big businesses build effective Instagram hashtag strategies – a real thing – which would expose them to a larger audience for better leads and more social media conversions. To understand effective Instagram hashtags, let us first understand a hashtag.
What Is a Hashtag?
The '#' or a pound sign – popularly known as a hashtag – is social media tag that is helpful in cross-referencing content by theme or topic. Hashtags also enable social media platforms to provide curated content, suggestions, and effective communication channels.
For example, a digital marketing agency would add Instagram hashtags such as #socialmediamarketing or #instagram to reach more people on Instagram linked with these hashtags.
Why use hashtags?
Hashtags help improve the social media experience and also cater to better brand outreach. Hashtags bring your posts in front of a larger audience connected to similar hashtags. To this effect, a poll on flyte suggests a 2x engagement between tweets with and without hashtags.
Hashtags were an invention by a Twitter employee in 2007 that is now being used on many social media platforms to provide a better user experience. Hashtags are a part of every digital marketing team to help them reach a wider audience. A well-researched hashtag can broaden a social media campaign by more than 21%, according to a poll by the website “socialpilot.”
Social media is full of posts, information, and other unnecessary stuff. Between all this, you will want to take help from hashtags to reach out to your potential customers.
How to find the best Hashtags for Your Brand?
Hashtags are like unique codes that will help you in effective media outreach. Using the right hashtags according to your niche is crucial, as irrelevant hashtags can create confusing posts.
Spamming Instagram posts with tons of unrelated hashtags is always a mistake. Some businesses adopt this strategy as it sometimes brings instant traffic to the website, but what it does in the long term are no target audience and a lowered brand value.
The best strategy is to find industry-related, customer-friendly hashtags that will be effective in the long run and help in better outreach.
Add those hashtags that signal your business's beliefs, values, and culture that resonates with your customer. A good example is a Nike post from 2020 that says, "Nike, For Once, Don't Do It," with #blm and #UntilWeAllWin hashtags that signalled their stance for a better world.
Finding good hashtags is easy. Check how others in your field use hashtags on their posts, or use the Instagram Auto-fill to help you choose the correct hashtag for your post.
You can also use several social media tracker services, like one from Semrush, for a detailed account of how your hashtags will perform in the market.
How to Use Hashtags on Your Social Media Platforms
Selecting the correct hashtag for your social media campaign is a critical step toward effective digital marketing. Even though the hashtag performs achieves the same goal for all social media platforms, we have listed some best hashtag practices for consistency on all social media platforms.
- Hashtags must be one word
- Numbers are allowed
- Spaces are not allowed
- Special characters are not allowed
The Best Hashtag Strategy For Instagram
Instagram allows 30 hashtags for each post, but that shouldn’t be taken as a cue to use every found hashtag in your post just because you are allowed to do so.
An effective rule for Instagram is to use only a dozen hashtags per post. Here are the different ways to put hashtags on Instagram.
Add a hashtag in the profile description by clicking on the "Edit Profile" under the Instagram features.
You can add a hashtag to the post itself. To add a post hashtag, you just have to type the '#' on your caption and then type a hashtag.
Adding hashtags to the comment section is also a good idea. Comments are more apparent for desktop users who will see the hashtags. For mobiles, the comment hashtags are hidden (for now) and can be accessed once a user clicks “View all comments.”
You can also use some pre-made posts to designate a “1st comment” to appear with your prescheduled post. These posts will create hashtags in your comments visible.
How to use Effective Hashtags For Other Social Media Platforms
Facebook was the most popular social media platform until Instagram. A small section of the market uses Facebook now, with most users switching to other platforms.
Keep Facebook's popularity in mind, and limit your hashtags to one or two per post.
Twitter popularized hashtags on social media platforms, the inventor of hashtags for social media.
Twitter is different from other social media platforms. Conversations work great for Twitter, and hard-core marketing posts only drive unrelated traffic to the website.
Strike up a conversation on Twitter about something related to your business that will help you bring more relevant traffic to your website.
For proper engagement and effective outreach, Twitter suggests only two hashtags in a post.
LinkedIn is a social media platform for professionals that connect similar hashtags. LinkedIn allows unlimited use of hashtags to widen your marketing outreach.
LinkedIn is a social media for professionals with proper guidelines for the posted content. Use formal language for LinkedIn content for effective catering to professional groups.
Even though you can add unlimited posts, LinkedIn suggests three hashtags per post.
TikTok
TikTok is a popular video-sharing platform that allows videos that are not more than ten minutes long. Tiktok uses hashtags to categorize its content for improved user experience.
TikTok has a unique way of using hashtags. TikTok mixes popular hashtags with business-related or brand hashtags. This type of strategy helps to draw more related traffic to your website. An example is Nike using the #FTP (For you page) and the #JustDoIt on TikTok.
Create more content on TikTok. Check out all the popular brands related to your niche, and use their commonly used hashtags.
Another thing you can do to use better hashtags is to enter a popular hashtag challenge. These hashtag challenges will help to create a frenzy around your brand and automatically draw more attention to your website.
TikTok has another great feature on its search bar that allows you to check the popular topic trending on TikTok. Prepare a list of all trending topics in your niche, and add them to your posts.
Hashtags are a great way to expose your idea in front of the entire world with the help of social media. Your product, brand voice, and a clear goal of correct social media marketing will resonate with your audience to boost online traffic. We have a great social media marketing team at kitoinfocom, who are always ready to create new ideas to cater to your brand in front of more potential customers. Check out our other digital marketing services on our website.
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