Hashtag Marketing
Digital Branding

Hashtag Marketing

What is Hashtag marketing?

Using effective hashtags has become almost vital in digital marketing these days. To increase the brand reach, digital marketers use trending hashtags across social media channels. These hashtags have a massive influence in the digital world. For a user who consumes the content, hashtags are very efficient to find relevant content. Thus, hashtags are becoming beneficial to both the user and marketer.

Basics first

Most widely, hashtags were used in twitter in the beginning but found their way into other social media channels too like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Pinterest. What is this hashtag? It is nothing but a keyword or a phrase following a #(hash). There shouldn’t be any spaces between the phrases while using it as a hashtag.

Too much or too little?

Yes, hashtags are to promote the content but don’t use it for every other word which will cause irritation to the reader. Try to keep the hashtags short and crisp rather than including a thread of words. Also, if you are using a hashtag which nobody is searching, there is no point in adding hashtags. Find the relevant hashtags and use them to attract the target audience effectively.

Identifying the hashtags

You are done writing your content, but how do you search for relevant hashtags? Check out the influencers in the same field as they would be using the trending hashtags. Apart from that, there are plenty of tools available on the internet to search for popular hashtags. These tools are available in both free and paid versions. Make use of free tools for a start.

But why hashtags?

Gaining more visibility on online platforms is the primary focus of a hashtag for digital marketers. It helps in reaching a much more comprehensive and extended audience which could be even more significant than the one planned in the framework. When a user searches for hashtags, they search for relevant content. This gives a chance to increase user engagement with the brand. These benefits add up ultimately to increase brand awareness.

History of hashtags

Hashtags go down in history dating back to 1988 when they were used to categorise the items like images, videos, etc. But they started getting popular when they were used on Twitter in 2007. Following that, Twitter officialised it by embedding the use of hashtags as codes in 2009. And from 2010, the terms ‘trending’ and ‘trending topics’ gained more noise in the social media platforms.

Social media platforms & hashtags

  1. 1. Twitter

    • The place where it all started. Hashtags are used to put the topics under relevant keywords to let the user find the content with ease
    • Trending topics are shown as per geo-location too.

  2. 2. Facebook

    • Gives more exposure but too many hashtags are bad for content quality on Facebook.

  3. 3. Instagram

    • More hashtags give more engagement.
    • On average, people use 10-12 hashtags per post.

  4. 4. Pinterest

    • Relevant contents and pins are clubbed together under a hashtag.
    • Gives you more engagement if the hashtag is a relevant keyword.

  5. 5. YouTube

    • Hashtags are used on YouTube in the comments section.
    • Can create an engagement with the viewers.

Inference

Hashtags are now a valuable asset when it comes to digital marketing. Learning about how to use them will increase the efficiency of the campaigns running across the channels. Using the appropriate tools will help widely in making the hashtag searches easier.

Contact us now to make your content more meaningful with hashtags.

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