How To Effectively Use Hashtags On All Major Social Media Platforms
Hashtags are one of those humorous social media features that are challenging to understand and use. However, once you’ve mastered them, the rewards begin to pour in. You must understand the uses of hashtags if you want to promote your brand on social media. Social media users use the hash symbol, formerly known as the pound sign, to make their content more visible.
Twitter’s first hashtag was originally made in 2007, indicating that people should begin using hashtags to start Twitter groups. Following its debut, the hashtag quickly gained popularity and is now utilized by 75% of users across multiple social media platforms.
Nowadays, companies are using to interact with consumers, attract new followers, join in on important discussions, have a bigger social impact, support social movements, inform content creation strategies, and more.
Prior to diving into specific platforms, it’s critical to understand how to use hashtags effectively, because once you do, you’ll see just how effective they are at boosting your brand. So let’s get started and know more about this subject in depth.
How to Use Hashtags On Social Media Platforms?
Hashtags are words or phrases that have the hash symbol in front of them. Simply put, they don’t have any spaces, can have numbers but no symbols or punctuation, and appear anywhere in a social media post or comment.
In fact, one of the best uses of hashtags is that they enable the social media network to index your post. That is to say, this makes it possible for anyone to find your content using the hashtags used, even if they aren’t already followers of your account. Therefore, using the appropriate hashtags can increase the number of potential followers you have on social media.
Although including hashtags in your marketing strategy may seem straightforward, doing so effectively is essential.
Types of Hashtags on Social Media
The following three categories of hashtags are common:
Content Hashtags
“Content hashtags” are terms or expressions that are specifically connected to your business because they relate to the content that your brand would be ordinarily associated with. In a nutshell, content hashtags are excellent for introducing your brand to untapped markets.
Trending Hashtags
These are already-used hashtags that have become well-liked by numerous users. When using a trending hashtag, ensure that your post contributes to the trending conversation. If it doesn’t, it’s probably going to go unnoticed.
Brand-Specific Hashtags
Your posts may occasionally get lost if you use generic content hashtags or widely used trending hashtags. Hence, coming up with original, brand-specific hashtags is a good idea. After all, these are suitable for marketing campaigns, competitions, activities, and branding.
Remember that selecting the best hashtags depends on the platform’s particular guidelines and recommended methods for utilizing hashtags on social media.
Methods while applying Hashtags on Different Platforms:
1. How on Instagram
Your Instagram marketing strategy should include using hashtags since this is the best platform for doing so. There is a cap of 30 hashtags per post, and while using all of them is not advised, you can experiment to see which ones are most effective for your brand.
The use of hashtags on Instagram is that the more you use them, the more engagement you see — up to a point. According to the latest reports, 9-12 hashtags produce the highest average engagement levels.
The secret to using hashtags on Instagram effectively is to combine popular and specialized hashtags. To put it another way, popular hashtags will increase the reach of your post, while niche hashtags will help you connect with more focused audiences.
2. How on Facebook
Facebook does permit hashtags, despite their less widespread use on other social networks. In fact, hashtag-containing Facebook posts generally perform worse than untagged ones. However, there are specific uses of hashtags on Facebook, such as events or promotions, where brand-specific hashtag are advantageous. In these scenarios, using hashtags on Facebook can increase the reach of your posts.
The most crucial thing to keep in mind is to avoid using too many hashtags. To point out, since Facebook isn’t as hashtag-focused as Instagram, using too many hashtags could make your brand seem annoying or spammy. Only 1–2 or 3 posts per day are normally advised for better reach.
Last but not least, make sure your Facebook post is public so that anyone who searches for a hashtag you’ve used can find it. Otherwise, it will only be visible to your friends and followers.
3. How on Linkedin
LinkedIn hasn’t always backed hashtags because, until recently, they were a dead giveaway for cross-posting from Twitter. Nevertheless, because LinkedIn is the most popular professional social network and its database has grown in size, they recognized the need to improve categorizing, organizing, and filtering user content.
In recent times, uses of hashtags on LinkedIn has resembled that on Instagram. Not to mention, brands can use trending hashtags to enhance the user experience, and users can use the search bar to look for particular hashtags. The primary distinction is that they are only clickable on mobile apps and not desktops.
4. How on Twitter
Tweets with hashtags get more retweets than tweets without them. Despite being the origin of the hashtag, Twitter only recommends using one per post, then two.
In addition to regular Tweets, hashtags are frequently used in the following contexts on Twitter.
● Progressively classifying all of your content with the same hashtag over time.
● Organizing or participating in a Twitter chat.
● The ability to create or curate stories on Twitter Moments.
● Looking up popular or the hashtags of rivals.
When it comes to Twitter ads, it’s best to avoid using hashtags because omitting them entirely will likely result in more ad clicks.
5. How on Pinterest
On Pinterest, hashtags help users find pins about particular subjects. Then, after clicking on a hashtag in a pin’s description, users can browse all the pins that also use that hashtag to find related pins.
When using hashtags on Pinterest, limit the number of hashtags to 20 per Pin and ensure that they are all relevant, specific, and descriptive. Finally, unlike other social media platforms, Pinterest hashtags only function within the descriptions of Pins.
6. How On YouTube
For YouTube users, hashtags are a simple way to find videos on trending subjects. So, when publishing your content online, add a hashtag to the title or description of your YouTube video. Similar to Pinterest, these are clickable and hyperlinked, and clicking them will display additional videos with the same tag.
Key Tip: Limit your uses of hashtags to 15 maximum, because if you exceed the limit, YouTube will disregard every hashtag and might even report your content due to your spammy behavior.
As a final point, YouTube forbids the hashtags that promote hate speech, are irrelevant to your content, are deceptive, sexual, explicit, deceptive, or intended to harass or demean another person.
Conclusion
In the world of social media, hashtags are a crucial component, and you can use them for a number of things. You can employ hashtags to group content, broaden their audience, participate in discussions, and advance campaigns. However, it is critical to use them correctly across various social media platforms.
Furthermore, you should keep your hashtags relevant and concise and use a mix of popular and niche hashtags to increase the visibility of your posts. With the proper uses of hashtags, your brand can reach a larger audience and increase social media engagement.
In short, there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to the best use of hashtags for your brand. Simply knowing your audience and figuring out what works on each social media platform are the first steps in developing a successful hashtag strategy.
Aside from that, it’s a learning experience. So experiment and analyze the results to discover what works and what doesn’t. Finally, to get the most out of your strategy, it’s important to do your research, use branded hashtags, keep it simple, and avoid going overboard.
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