6 Ways Hashtags Can Improve Your Social Media Presence

29 Mar 6 Ways Hashtags Can Improve Your Social Media Presence

1. Boost Your Post & Profile Reach

Hashtags are a great way to boost the organic reach of your social media posts. This is because hashtags are searchable (and on most social media networks clickable). People use hashtags to find relevant content and conversations – so using hashtags can help place your content in front of your ideal audience. Recently Instagram has allowed you to follow hashtags which brings more visibility to profile posts and your Instagram Stories. Keep running hashtag lists for your industry hashtags, content related hashtags, and hashtags your audience is using – and remember to update these regularly.

Some social media networks (like Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest) allow for hashtags within your profile biography – helping your profile pop up in searches and expanding your visibility.

2. Find & Join Conversations On Social Media

As I mentioned before, hashtags are a search function. People use them to find conversations and content online. A hashtag search can lead you to people talking about your brand, a competitor’s brand, or simple conversations around topics that may be relevant to your brand or business. Use these conversations to connect with your audience and maybe even potential customers by answering questions, and giving tips to relieve pain points. You can even take part in local community based conversations.

Searching hashtags can also help you find timely, trending topics that you can take part in. Make sure to research the trend before taking part of it to avoid any social mishaps. Being part of a trending topic can offer your brand or business great exposure since there are many people creating content and conversations around the topic. Trending topics are also a good way to show personality. Think holidays, national events, themed hashtag days, or local happenings.

3. Social Listening/Research/Product Development

While we’re still on the subject of finding conversations, you can use hashtags to find your audience’s pain points and expand your offerings or create content that adds more value to your target audience.

4. Create Your Own Branded Hashtag

Creating a branded or campaign specific hashtag can help you in so many ways. It reinforces your branding, it can help you keep track of the success of your campaigns and can also help you keep track of user generated content. So why is all this important? Tracking the hashtag performance of your campaign or your branded hashtag will let you know how well your campaign is doing and wether or not you’re gaining more reach and brand awareness. Keeping track of user generated content is helpful because you can repost this content – which helps with your social media posting schedule – but, it’s another great way to track customer reviews, and how well your brand is being received.

5. Drive Event Engagement

Hashtags are great for driving engagement and conversation during events! Attendees can post about whats happening (expanding the reach of your event), they can interact with each other, and the speakers and attendees can also take advantage the event hashtags by keeping everyone updated on session info and getting interactive with questions or polls based on the event happenings. Be sure to visually represent your hashtag along with calls to actions on event materials, on screens at the event, and verbally asking attendees to share using your event hashtag.

6. Build A Community

Last but not least, taking every opportunity we just went over, hashtags are a great way to build a community online. People using hashtags have the opportunity to find each other and build relationships. One great example of this is communities built around Twitter chats. Each week people show up to learn, and discuss ideas based on the chat they take part in, and they find each other by using the event hashtag. What’s more social than that? (besides meeting in person of course).

As you can see, hashtags are a simple tool to help you greatly improve your social media marketing. They do require time and research – but the value they bring to your social media strategy will be worth it. How do you currently take advantage of hashtags in your social media marketing?

<3 DhariLo