Top 3 Uses of Hashtags in Your Social Media Marketing

In all the social media trainings and presentations I do each year, hashtags is always a hot button topic. Businesses know about hashtags but many of them don’t understand their value or the appropriate way to use them. Hashtags are a powerful strategy for getting your content seen but only if you use them the right way.

Here are the top 3 uses for hashtags in your social media marketing:

The Power of Search

Since every social media channel happens to be a search engine, hashtags help people locate the type of content they want to find. If someone wants to know more about social media marketing, they can type in #socialmediamarketing into any of the social media platforms and find posts that have been tagged with that hashtag. For folks who use social media this way, and it’s common on platforms like Twitter and Instagram, if you aren’t using the right hashtags you won’t show up in those searches.

Hashtag Followers

On Instagram, users can actually follow hashtags the way you follow accounts, people or businesses. By following a specific hashtag, it allows users to find content on a topic they care about from people they haven’t heard from before. Otherwise, they’d be stuck only viewing content from accounts and influencers they already knew about. If you are a photographer, using the #photography hashtag will pull that bit of content into the feed for that hashtag and into the feeds of those who follow it.

Content Grouping

The original purpose of hashtags was to allow Twitter users to group content together. For example, if a conversation was happening about 2020 marketing trends and you wanted to see all the questions and comments attached to that conversation, everyone using the same hashtag (#2020marketingtrends, for example) would help people keep up with the conversation.

This also works well for big events. If the event organizer gets the word out that every post should include their official hashtag it helps attendees and organizers to see what everyone is posting about that event online.

For those not well-versed in social media, hashtags can be confusing. Sometimes, they can appear to be downright silly. However, if you understand why they exist and the most effective ways to use them then you can expand your online reach much further.

If hashtags and social media confuse you, give us a call. Our team loves to help business owners make an impact online with their social media marketing.

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Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and the tools to manage them.

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