Excellent Ways to Use Hashtags in Social Media Marketing
It’s 2019 and pretty much everyone knows what this sign # in front of every second word on social media means. But how did the hashtag jump to social networks? In 2007, open source advocate Chris Messina suggested using hashtags on Twitter, and his idea fell on fertile ground. Soon, hashtags on Twitter were being used to gather and categorize conversations.
But the first time a hashtag was used extensively as a way to categorize tweets and was adopted by the public was during the San Diego fire on October 23, 2007, when Nate Ritter used Twitter to report on the fire and included the hashtag #sandiegofire.
In 2009 Twitter reacted officially and started hyperlinking Hashtags to search results. And soon other Social Networking sites started implementing them as well. Networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr followed it, all with varying degrees of success and with a strong focus on advertising.
# Marketing With Hashtag:
As a marketer, you want to be able to reach your community with the use of hashtags, especially during events, The main opportunity for marketers lies with the creation of said hashtag campaigns. A hashtag campaign is a marketing initiative usually meant to gain social media attention, to create engagement, or drive traffic for a specific topic, product or idea. Companies, organizations or individuals can all be behind a hashtag campaign. They can be used to introduce a new product, spread content from a blog or a video, to get more interaction with customers, to create awareness for a cause, etc. Using hashtags enables people who are looking for content or a publication on a given subject to find it faster. Any brand can take advantage of it by using hashtags in such a way that the browser shows our posts.
# Choose Easy and Perfect Hashtag:
When choosing a hashtag, it’s important to make sure that your hashtag is easy for users to remember. One important factor for a successful hashtag marketing campaign is choosing a hashtag that is new, memorable. This requires creativity and the setting of clear goals for the campaign that will determine the hashtag. With thousands of hashtags roaming the social media universe, the last thing a business wants to do is create a hashtag that is hard to spell or pronounce. Users will end up spelling it wrong and this defeats the purpose of having a hashtag in the first place. Hashtags should be short, easy to pronounce and spell and give users a better idea about the topic of the conversation or tweet stream. In 2017, Heineken created a social campaign and a flagship hashtag at the same time, namely #OpenYourWorld. In the campaign, people of completely different world views were asked to do a series of tasks together. Within a week, the video had 3 million views and 500 thousand shares.
# Use the Hashtag on Multiple Social Media platform:
We want to be easy to find by our public, but we also want to be able to find specific content fast. As you work toward making your hashtag second nature for many users, try to adopt it on multiple social media platforms. Although the use of hashtags may have started on Twitter, they are now used across multiple social media channels including Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Hashtags allow users to organize their content and pictures while also instilling the hashtag into the minds of their audience. If people see a hashtag once, it may stick in their minds if it is truly memorable. But most likely it takes a couple of times of seeing the hashtag to really remember it.
Use the hashtag on multiple social media platforms. This helps you in two ways. First, this gives your hashtag more exposure to more people to help spread the word about it. Second, this helps people to remember your hashtag when they see it multiple times on different social media platforms.
# Create brand engagement:
The actual power of hashtagging is the ability to connect your brand with various popular and incredibly visible topics, which will drive new viewers to your social media presence, as well as give you the opportunity to engage with them. When well-crafted and used sparingly, hashtags can help increase your visibility and even improve customer relations. The more comfortable your followers feel with your brand, the more likely they will be to attempt interacting with you via social media.
You definitely don’t want to ignore them, but you don’t necessarily want to use hashtags while conversing with your followers either. As noted above, you don’t necessarily need to use a hashtag in every post, but it’s particularly important to remember that you should not use them while responding to someone. Whether it’s a retweet or a reply, avoid plugging these characters in when they are not needed. if you really want to create brand engagement with your followers then definitely you need many more followers. if you don’t have many followers then you don’t reach your brand to the maximum audience. on this case, you need to buy real followers from the social media service provider.
Hashtags are undoubtedly powerful in strengthening brand communication.remember that from the point of view of marketing, the use of hashtags definitely requires a fully-built strategy. Depending on the social media platform, however, a slightly different approach will be required. Let’s not underestimate the huge potential of this manner of communicating, running campaigns, organizing events or promotions. Increased reach and user engagement are what show that the effort pays off.
