Hashtags are words, phrases or titles that enhance the impact of a social media post. Hashtags are useful to categorize posts, improving engagement and attracting followers to your industry. Hashtags also strengthen the brand image and help you reach out to the target audience and lets your followers/consumers to reach you too. Reportedly, over 95 million photo posts are uploaded on Instagram daily. This makes the role of hashtags extremely essential to improving engagement on your posts.
However, using hashtags too frequently is also a no-no. Using too many hashtags on a single post can actually rank it as spam and lower its overall exposure. Ideally, a post should have anywhere between 8 – 15 hashtags.
Strategic use of hashtags has helped thousands of small businesses to become renowned brands globally.
How Hashtags Benefits You and Your Business
Here are a few major ways that hashtags benefit you and your business:
1 – Improve Your Post’s Organic Reach
Instagram’s last update has made it harder for users to improve the organic reach of their posts. Plus, the number of Instagram users is also increasing daily. This means that your post will likely be buried within tens of thousands of other posts. To prevent this, you need to use hashtags strategically.
Hashtags help Instagram to categorize posts for the user’s convenience. These also help to highlight the posts to the interested audience directly. However, you need to avoid over-using hashtags as it can result in a shadowban on your posts for some time.
Some Tips To Gain The Most Out Of Hashtags Include:
- Using precise hashtags
- Using relevant hashtags
- Monitoring competitor’s hashtags
2 – Make Branded Hashtags
Creating branded hashtags can often be the most crucial thing for a successful post. Branded hashtags contain your brand’s name. Additionally, they may also contain your company’s tag-line, a specific product name, or relevant to a marketing campaign.
The first benefit of using branded hashtags is that it allows you to monitor the progress of your marketing campaign. Second, users will use your branded hashtags in their generated posts and boost the impact of your brand name on the platform.
3 – Participate In Trending Topics
Trending topics engage a significant number of users and can benefit your marketing campaign immensely. Using a relevant hashtag for a trending topic can attract a massive audience to your brand,
service, product and content. This way, you can reach out to users who are not actually part of your existing audience.
4 – Join A Conversation
This is similar to joining a trending topic. You can join a conversation on social media by using the relevant hashtags. Make sure to choose topics of conversation that are directly relevant to your company or business for maximum impact.
5 – Create A Hashtag-Centric Community
Hashtags not just help to build a brand name but also helps to create entire communities of like-minded users. If your hashtag becomes sufficiently popular online, then users will begin using the hashtag to strike up conversations which will eventually help your post become extremely popular online.
Conclusion
Using hashtags in marketing campaigns is somewhat of an art. You need to create the perfect balance between sufficient and over-the-top hashtags. Feel free to let us know how this article helped you boost your popularity online using hashtags.
