Remember when the # symbol was just a simple icon on your phone? Hashtags have changed the digital marketing industry permanently and it all started with Twitter. Twitter was the first social media platform that got the ball rolling for Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest, etc. With hashtag, it’s not how many you use, but the quality of the ones you choose. If you choose hashtags that most people are using, you have the potential to reach a larger audience. While if you choose hashtags that not many people use you won’t get any traction. Let’s start with the basics of why hashtags are so important in today’s online climate.
Hashtags are crucial in the social media field because if you don’t use hashtags in your posts, you won’t be able to reach as many people. The only eyes to your content would be your followers if you decide not to use hashtags. With the ability now of adding a hashtag you have the chance of expand your reach to millions of people. A best practice I would follow is to change your hashtags every few weeks or so. This would benefit your company because you can bring variety to who sees your content.
Brand specific hashtags are, in my opinion, the most important type of hashtag you should focus on for the following reasons. They can be used in multiple ways such as general branding, promotions, events, contests or marketing campaigns. For this type of hashtag, you have to make sure no one has used it before and that it’s catchy enough to be memorable for people to remember it. For example: when Coca-Cola used the hashtag #ShareACoke to promote Coca-Cola, it turned viral quickly. Another advantage of using brand specific hashtags is when people click on it, they’ll be able to see all of your content in a single click. We’ll go over each social media platform and how to make the most of hashtags. Let’s start with Twitter.
Twitter was the first social media platform to make hashtags the norm. A best practice is to have no more than 2 hashtags on Twitter. If you have over 2 there’s a chance your tweet may get less engagement. To find the most useful hashtags that will give you the maximum reach I would check out the sites Hashtag and Twitonomy. I would place your hashtags at the end of your tweet or place them within your sentence. We also noticed a trend that if you use hashtags, you’ll usually receive more retweets leading to more people seeing your content.
On Instagram the maximum number of hashtags recommended are 10. Any more than 10 your engagement level starts to lower. With Instagram it’s easy to see which hashtags are going to be the most effective. Go to the search bar and scroll to tags and then you’ll be able to see which ones have the most followers and go from there. There is a maximum of 30 hashtags you can use, but I wouldn’t go close to the mark because it could look like spam and wouldn’t look professional.
LinkedIn started to get into hashtags just a few years ago and they recommend using 4 or 5 hashtags per posts like Instagram. If you have too many it could look like spam. With LinkedIn you have to keep in mind that you can’t use the same hashtags as the other social media platforms because it’s made for B2B (business to business). For example: using the hashtag NHL on LinkedIn will definitely not get the same value as using it on Instagram.
Pinterest allows you to have no more than 20 hashtags. Keep in my mind while posting on Pinterest the hashtags should be put inside the pins’ descriptions.
With more social media platforms bound to come in the next few years, hashtags will always have that ever-lasting impact to get the most eyes on your content. What you have to remember is that the number of hashtags doesn’t matter. It’s the ones that you choose that can make all the difference.