‘Why, hashtag? Which hashtag should I use? What’s the purpose of using a hashtag? You Social Media Marketing guys get paid just for using hashtags in your post, right?’ Well being a Social Media Marketer we all are flooded by these questions daily, right?
We at Spacemen have finally decided that we can’t let you guys be bothered by these questions anymore. So here we are back with another interesting piece of content clearing all the clouds around hashtags ranging from what are hashtags to why are they essential to how can you use them in your social media posts.
What Is A Hashtag?
Hashtags are one of the most critical components of Social Media Marketing. They are one of the best ways to make your content visible and to find relevant content coming from other businesses. It increases your reach and eventually if the content is good like if people are engaging with it (your post) then you content gets pushed to huge audience base. Hashtags even help you in bridging the content gap. In the later parts of this article, I’ll explain how you can bridge the content gap using a bit of information available on hashtags.
Why Are They Important?
Because they help you get discovered, they help you get your content discovered. Whenever you add an appropriate hashtag with your post, it helps you in getting your content indexed by social media crawlers and become more discoverable by other users. Including them in your content further helps you in categorizing content for your audience.
John Brown back in 2019, said, “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.”
So now you can realize the importance of using the right hashtags in your social media content. They further also help in improving brand awareness. It is yet another critical factor that’ll help you in standing unique against all your competitors.
For Eg: Remember the recent Gillette India Ad discussing the real-life story of Lt Col Manoj Kumar Sinha SM and his father, deployed with hashtags like #ShavingStereotypes and #ManEnough. That ad by Gillette India deployed alongside those two hashtags generated some amazing engagements as it showed people the real meaning of manliness and strength alongside challenging the stereotypes surrounding what it takes to be a real man. People used those hashtags a lot of time as they shared this on their social media feeds. This recent advert deployed with those hashtags not only inspired a lot of people, but it also improved the loyalty of people towards Gillette.
They are also very helpful in improving in Click Through Rate. For Eg: When you insert hashtags in your social media post, you just enhance the messaging that you’re sending out. Hashtags help people identify the content they’re looking for, just as headlines do in cases of articles. If something is catering to their needs, they will for sure click on that and eventually click through rates for that campaign will increase.
How Do Hashtags Help In Bridging The Content Gap?
Hashtags are also helpful in bridging the content gap across various social media platforms. I’ll explain by giving out an example of the solution to the question mentioned above.
For Example: On LinkedIn and Instagram, people follow certain Hashtags, right? Even you might be following some at the moment. So apparently, ‘#motivation‘ is one of the most followed hashtags on LinkedIn. Well now the question arises how can you bridge the content gap using that piece of information, so what you do is you create a piece of motivating content which eventually adds value to people’s lives, and then you let them buy it.
Similarly ‘#digitalmarketing‘ is also one of the most trending tags on LinkedIn and here as well you do the same thing, you plan a good piece of content out, and then you push it to the crowd.
It even helps you in bridging the content gap between different platforms. Like at many times, we end up making content which will go viral on LinkedIn or some other Social Media platforms, but it might not be the same case with Instagram. Like, for example, Some random meme which will go viral on Instagram will not go viral on LinkedIn. Basically, the thing here is the mindset of people using Instagram at the moment will be different than the people using LinkedIn. Like at the time I’m writing this article, hashtags trending on LinkedIn and Instagram are different which is a clear indicator of the fact that people using LinkedIn want to see something else than people on Instagram. So here you keep close tabs on Hashtags, and accordingly, you create valuable content.
Hashtags Research Tools:
Well, in this topic, I’ll be discussing a few tools that can help you with your hashtag research. Trust me when I say this a little keyword research can help you stand a mile ahead of your competitor. So be ready as I reveal to you the top 5 tools that can help you in your hashtag research.
Hashtagify: Hashtagify will help you with all the information that you need to know about brand hashtags and how they are being used, including alongside who’re the top influencers that are using them.
KeywordTool: This tool will help you in figuring out several relevant hashtags for your content in a matter of a few seconds. Just enter a hashtag in their keyword box and sit back to see the magic happen.
Keyhole: This tool will help you in analyzing hashtags on Instagram and Twitter in real-time. Keyhole will help you with information like the number of posts containing that specific hashtag to each post’s reach and stats.
Rite tag: Rite tag is known for its instant hashtag suggestion feature for images and texts.
Pixlee: Pixlee’s Instagram Analytics tool help you with information like hashtag statistics alongside a brief report on your web content.
Best Hashtag Practices:
- Be very mindful of what you’re using as a hashtag for your content. Check whether is it the right hashtag for your content or not.
- Do Your Research: Look out for what your audience is looking for in your content by comparing to industry peers and doing your research. Lookup for new trends and get new hashtags out of them.
- Keep them short and memorable: Because you want it to be a memorable one for your audience base and keeping long & irrelevant hashtags won’t help you with that purpose.
- Don’t #spam your content with too many hashtags; otherwise, you’ll increase the risks of social media crawlers marking your content as spam.
- Make sure your hashtag defines what your content stands for.
I hope you find this piece of content helpful. Now let me know what tip from today’s article you are going to try first. Do let me know in the comments section.
