“Hashtag goals”… You know that an Internet technology trend is here to stay when people start referring to using it out in the real world (or in late-night comedy sketches). Love them or hate them, it just makes sense to incorporate the best hashtags for social media in your marketing outreach.
Given their popularity and usefulness, hashtags have a lot of benefits when they are deployed strategically. They are a great way to make sure more people see your content, improve your SEO, allow you to take advantage of current trends, help you raise brand awareness, reach specific customers, and more!
Keep reading to get our five best tips for finding and using the best hashtags for social media.
Where did hashtags come from?
Open-source advocate Christopher Reaves Messina invented the hashtag we all know and love back in 2007 when he proposed adding the pound symbol before content as a way to do dynamic, user-generated tagging of posts.
how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?
— molly.com/chris (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007
How many hashtags can you use on a post?
Twitter recommends only using one or two hashtags per post as a best practice. Still, Instagram will allow up to 30 hashtags a post and encourages you to multiple options as appropriate. That’s because posts with at least one hashtag get 29% more interactions, and those with 11+ hashtags have the highest interactions (around 79.5%), according to research by Sticky Content.
Hashtag use isn’t as common on other platforms, but don’t let that steer you away from using them. Hashtags offer more to your posts and get them more views as they will appear in trending topics and search results on platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
What are the four best hashtags for social media?
Hashtags are a great way to help your content rank in different areas. Here are four different types of hashtags that can be used in your marketing to help your business thrive on social media.
Branded hashtags
Branded hashtags can be similar to product or service hashtags in the sense of making these hashtags reflect your company, but these are more a slogan or something specific to your brand, e.g., a service or product.
Campaign hashtags
To kick things up a notch, when you have a campaign you want to gain a lot of traction on, you can plan to create a specific and unique hashtag for your event.
Campaign hashtags will give you the ability to monitor the performance of your campaign and how it’s trending while keeping your campaign in a specific audience looking for topics similar to your campaign, therefore driving more traffic. This will also give you a great promotional tactic. Suppose you have a giveaway or competition going on social media. In that case, you’ll be able to have your participants tag on your hashtag to any related post that will increase awareness and ultimately drive more traffic to your campaign.
Pro-tip: Follow Coca-Cola’s lead.
Businesses with great hashtag campaigns choose phrases to amplify that support their overall brand messaging.
First launched in Australia in 2011, Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke marketing initiative used the power of personalized messaging and hashtags to tell a memorable story that supports the main brand message: happiness.
To create an interactive experience for their customers, Coca-Cola’s marketing team replaced its brand name on bottles with the names of its customers. Then, they incorporated a custom hashtag in posts across all of its social media channels to spread the word to support the campaign and build awareness for its signature product.
As one of the longest-running and most successful marketing campaigns of all time, Coca-Cola reached people in over 80 countries thanks—in no small part–because of its clever use of hashtags.
Product or service best hashtags
Companies use product hashtags for posts related to their product and service offerings. This will usually be general, such as #wedesign, #marketingagency, etc. Although these are general niches, the more you can be specific to your niche within the industry the better. Try to use words and phrases you’ll rank for.
As a digital marketing agency in central Indiana, TBH Creative uses its social media channels to educate clients and attract new leads. Though the hashtag #marketing describes our area of expertise, it is not very specific. It might catch the attention of students studying advertising, creative types at other agencies who also work in marketing, and folks looking for marketing inspiration in addition to our target audiences (businesses that need marketing help).
As such, we often use more distinctive hashtags on our social posts—such as #marketingagency, #socialmediamarketing, and #healthcaremarketing—since they are a better fit for who we want to reach.
Location hashtags
Like campaign hashtags, location hashtags are some of the best social media hashtags to find and attract new customers.
You can use these to help filter an audience in your specific location to grow your target audience, or you can use these in times you have an event or conference. Many businesses also choose to successfully deploy this tactic when hosting events or conferences.
Creating a social media strategy that includes hashtags
There’s a method to the madness of using hashtags, and now that you have the insights on the best hashtags for social media, you can create posts on any platform and know that using these will help to increase your views. Your new strategy that includes hashtags might just help you gain new followers and clients.
