The #Decoding of the #Hashtag

The #Decoding Of The #Hashtag

It is 2021, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is touching almost all points of life. Even now, when it comes to social media marketing, hashtags remain as popular as they were when they first came out. They can increase your chances of reaching more people with a whopping 442% more engagement upon using 11 or more hashtags in an Instagram post as opposed to using none. 

Using hashtags is not rocket science, but an art that has grown over time as a popular marketing tool for most brands, marketers, and content creators. To streamline the entire process of hashtagging for marketers and entrepreneurs alike, tech giants are constantly developing better and improved tools.

 

What are hashtags?

A hashtag is a combination of letters and/or numbers preceded by the # symbol, first used as such in the summer of 2007 by Chris Messina. They categorize content to a specific topic, event, theme, or conversation. Upon clicking/tapping upon a hashtag or conducting a hashtag search, it returns a page with all the posts tagged with that hashtag. 

They make it easier to locate posts throughout specific topics by aggregating all social media content comprising the same hashtags. By doing so, they connect social media content to specific topics, events, themes, or conversations.

 

Why do you need hashtags?

Hashtags expand your social media audience. Using them builds a user community online, motivating people to engage with your brand. Social media users can also wish to subscribe to hashtags, which implies that they could view your hashtagged posts in their feed even if they don’t follow you or your brand. There are more advantages to hashtags besides increasing your social media audience:

 

1. Enhanced customer engagement on social media

Hashtags in posts mean taking part in a conversation – making your posts visible in a conversation, resulting in greater engagement. Therefore, boosting your brand’s social media engagement.

 

2. Brand building 

A branded hashtag is a powerful channel that is used to promote businesses and drive conversations, boosting your brand’s social media credibility.

 

3. Hashtags show brands beliefs

Using hashtags that unites an issue beyond your brand is a technique to mobilize followers of an important cause or issue.

 

4. Append meaning to a social media post

Long captions aren’t always the most effective — sometimes, less is more. Using hashtags is a simplistic approach to contextualize what you’re talking about without applying repetitive captions.

 

Your target audience finds you

Across the various social media networks, users follow hashtags as well as other users or brands. Employing several commonly used hashtags is another way to help new users find your brand.

 

Can you manually generate your own hashtag?

You might ask yourself and the answer is yes, you can. 

Finding the appropriate hashtags specific to your brand, and your industry that resonates among your audience, you’ll have to research, keeping the following in mind:

• Hashtags always start with # and they will not work if you use spaces, punctuation, or symbols within the terms.
• Ensure your accounts are public or else the content bearing your hashtag will not be seen by any non-followers.
• Avoid sequencing too many words into the hashtag, as the short and easy-to-remember hashtags tend to be relatively the most beneficial.
• Limit the number of hashtags to relevant and specific ones: More hashtags make the content look spammy while being hard to find and most likely other social media users would not use them.

Also, keep in mind “The most popular hashtags out there aren’t necessarily the best hashtags.” Now that we understand hashtags better, you can not just create your own but use existing ones too. How? You may ask. Well, here are two ways for finding the best ones for you:

• Observe other social media influencers and competition:

Gather info on your competition and the relevant influencers amidst your brand’s target. Carefully record which ones they use most often. This guerilla technique assists you in determining the way your adversaries are engaging amidst your administered target audience and what keywords they tend to use.

• Use an AI-based tool:

AI-based hashtagging tools help you find the best and popular Hashtags for your brand. You can choose to simply type in your caption or search in popular terms, and it will provide you with hashtags suggestions. AI also identifies the trending hashtags based on your content. The best ones give your post maximum visibility over time.

 

What comes next? 

Now that you already have a list of considerably functioning hashtags that work well for your brand, you may consider using related ones. Some of them might be a little concise than the popular hashtags you were previously using. Doing so would help you connect with a more targeted audience. Also, keep track of hashtags that you have used in the past and analyze posts that have been most popular. Look for trends. If the most popular posts always contain a selected few of the same hashtags, consider including them in your future posts as well.

If you have not started already, it’s high time you begin applying them in your social media posts. Though hashtags earned fame in 2007, they have only grown more useful and popular for your brand today!

Combine your social media strategy with paid advertising to reach more people and get better results.

 

Contact us or book a free consultation. We’ll guide you through the process and show you that a successful social media campaign does not have to be expensive nor rocket science!