ARE HASHTAGS REALLY USEFUL? HOW TO FIND THE RIGHT ONE?

With the change in the methods of digital marketing, social media has taken up the important role of attraction and accessibility for brands. But, when everyday sea of content is being created by brands on social media, pulling out right content could have easily become like finding a needle in haystack if not for the hashtags.

Multiple researches support that using hashtags help generating attention as compared to not using them at all. They make brands more accessible to the customers and help customers in finding the right content easily.

What is a hashtag?

A Hashtag is pound sign (#) followed by keywords or phrases without any space (and sometimes with each word capitalized for ease of reading). It is used on social media to locate particular information or content. For example: if you are looking for content writing agency, you can search by #ContentWritingAgency on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest etc. Search result will pull out all the content labelled with #ContentWritingAgency from all over the world. Content that is most engaging and trending will show up first in results, just like in case of SEO.

Why to use it?

Hashtag is an incredible tool to reach potential target audience on social media. Regardless of whether someone has liked your page or not, follows your page or not, they can find your content using hashtag. So even if your brand is just a start-up and doesn’t have huge fan following community, using right hashtags allows you to reach to anyone who might be interested in your products or services. Apart from making it easier for customers to find relevant content, posts with hashtags are also likely to create greater audience interactions, which lead to improved brand engagement.

Hashtags are pivotal for creating buzz about campaigns. In a way, hashtags empower your audience to become your brand ambassadors. For example: #MakeInIndia has registered more than 1 billion impression on social media. This overwhelming buzz would not have been possible if all the brands, celebrities, politicians and public at large had not used #MakeInIndia while posting their content. Be it public movements like #MeToo or branded content like #ShareACoke, use of hashtag is instrumental in enormous success of these campaigns.

How to choose the correct hashtag?

1)  When you are using hashtags to make your content easy to find

In this case, hashtags should be the keywords customers are likely to use to find your products and services. They should be very objective driven, shorter, predictable for the customers, and relevant to the industry, or else they will become futile. Remember, here hashtag is not about standing out. In fact, it’s the contrary; using keywords or phrases which are most commonplace. For example if a content writing agency wants to promote their blog writing services, they should use hashtags like #BlogWritingServices #BlogWriters #ProfessionalBlogger #AdvertisingBlogWriters #JewelleryBlogWriters #FoodBlogWriters etc.

There are also websites dedicated to help you find most relevant hashtags for a particular topic. Using such websites you can find right hashtags for your content with the least effort and generate more reward from your content.

2) When you are creating hashtag for a campaign

In this case too, hashtag should be shorter and very easy to understand in order for it to be relatable to a greater chunk of your audience. But here, hashtag will be words that are most succinct representation of your campaign objective and words that are likely to stimulate action or emotional response from your audience. #ShareACoke is accurate example for a campaign hashtag. It expresses the campaign’s core message in the most effective and simple manner while also invoking action. Effective hashtag will encourage greater public participation, which in turn can help your content trend on social media.

How much is too much?

While using hashtags is imperative in the age of social media, overdoing it will increase vagueness and dismantle brands’ identity. Also, too many and too diverse hashtags may spoil your chances to appear early in search results, as algorithm might consider your content as a spam. It is important to understand hashtags in a way that they serve to provide accessibility and not distraction. Many researchers have pointed out specific number of hashtags to be used on specific social media platform to get maximum attention without becoming futile.

• Twitter: not more than 2
• Instagram: not more than 20
• Facebook: not more than 10
• YouTube: not more than 5

Hashtags are one of the key pillars in backing up a brand on social media. However, a brand needs a lot more than just right hashtags to reach out to maximum target audience. Whether you are new to social media branding or want professional help to manage your brand on social media, you can reach out to Content Kafe. We can help you create content that creates buzz with hashtags that make the buzz louder.