Lately I have heard many people (most of them self-proclaimed social media experts) giving the advice that hashtags are useless, and telling their clients not to bother with them.
In my professional opinion, this is bad advice. Hashtags on any platform can be very useful if you take the time to build an appropriate strategy around your content.
Are hashtags useful?
On many social networks, you see a lot of useless hashtags-- ones that there are few tags for, and which you will most likely not see again. You know the ones I mean: #ThisIsAUselessHashtagExample or #FeelingHotInTheFloridaSun.
You usually see these types of hashtags being shared casually by people that are not using their social media profiles for a marketing purpose. They can be fun, but they serve no useful purpose.
How to Make Hashtags Useful
- Use hashtags to index your content – With the right strategy, you can set up a public library of sorts that can index your content and make it easier to find. For example, if you own a healthy living company, you should consider using multiple different hashtags. You could use #dailysupplements for any supplements that you may sell. This gives your company an index of its supplements that can easily be given to others. It can be easily found within the social network, and if you used Google+ the hashtags can also be found through Google Search.
- Use hashtags to promote engagement – Throwing an event that you would like people to be able to discuss and share stories and details about? Let your guests promote the event for you-- just like when you use a hashtag to index your shared content, a hashtag can index what other people share about your event. Your guests or event attendees can converse during the event and keep in touch afterward using this hashtag.
- Use hashtags to gather data – If you are giving away a free product or service, you could encourage people to leave feedback using the specific tag. This will allow you to go back later and see how many people responded and what the sentiment is about the product or service.
Using hashtags with any of these strategies is a great way to allow people to explore what it is that your brand has to offer. But creating the hashtag is not enough: you have to promote it, get it in front of people, and most of all, use it and encourage others to use it as well!
Hashtag Visibility
Once you have created your hashtag, all the work is done, right? Wrong!
People need to know why they should engage with your hashtag. What benefit is it going to give them? If your tags do not add a useful benefit for the people you are trying to reach, they will never click on them. Make sure you let people know what you have indexed with your tags, and how they can either find savings, more information, or funny images if they click on the tags to explore more.
Call attention to hashtags that you think your audience will benefit from, directly in your post or even in the image. If you have an ongoing hashtag that other people can use to join you in discussion, you may want to share tag usage metrics to showcase your fans and followers who use your hashtag the most. This could encourage more people to use the hashtag and increase overall visibility.
When they are used strategically, hashtags can go beyond a casual string of words to serve a useful purpose for marketing a product, service, or idea. They can serve as a uniting factor for fans and followers that are spread out across the web, and sustain conversation over months and even years. How have you seen hashtags used effectively across the web?
Hashtagging Tips:
- Establish a new hashtag – Look for a tag that is short (6-10 characters max) and make sure to tag all relevant content that you produce or share with it. The idea is to build a very strong library that people can go back to often and find new material.
- Hijack a semi-popular hashtag – Search for a hashtag that is already in use, but is not already excessively used (you don’t want to steal a hashtag from someone that is actually putting work into it). If you noticed some hashtags that no one company is trying to dominate, I feel it is fair game and you should do your best to take it over if it fits your content model.
- Hashtag speaking events – If you happen to be speaking at a convention or even just a presentation, you could try to leverage hashtags to answer audience questions.
- Don’t over hashtag! – Putting too many tags in your post can be considered a spammy practice, and may keep people from engaging with your content. Try keeping the amount of tags you place in your post low, around 1-3 tags at the bottom of your post.