How to Get The Most Out Of Your Hashtags

04 May How to Get The Most Out Of Your Hashtags

I’m sure you keep hearing about the importance of hashtags in your social media marketing, but in this post I’ll review some basic techniques to help you get the most out of your hashtag strategy!

Find Hashtags That Work for Your Business

Hashtags aren’t one size fits all! To get the most out of your hashtags, find the RIGHT hashtags for your business or brand. Although it may be attractive to use generic popular hashtags for exposure – in practice this will work against you. Hashtags like #love and #beautiful have hundreds of thousands of posts, but these generic hashtags are going to attract what I call empty engagement. You may get a bunch of likes, but not from people who are actually interested in your business or brand. Try using a mix of your business related hashtags and keywords and hashtags that capture the context of your message, video or photo. You can even check out the competition or influencers in your niche for hashtags that work for your audience. For some more ideas on how to find hashtags that will work for your brand or business read How to Find the Right Hashtags for Your Business and make sure to read up on the 8 top hashtags mistakes I’ve seen in the time I’ve been in social media.

Use Hashtags in Accordance to The Network You’re On

To get the most out of your hashtags on specific social media networks, pay attention to how to use hashtags on the network (if at all). Use up to two hashtags per tweet on Twitter, use up to 30 hashtags on Instagram. For Facebook and Google+ I suggest testing messaging with and without hashtags. Finally, LinkedIn, where hashtags just started working for some accounts – we’ll know more about hashtags after they stay around a little longer. For now I suggest sticking to one or two per caption.

Don’t Overuse Hashtags

One of the most annoying things I’ve seen are captions that are just a string of hashtags. I will say I have seen it done creatively, but not every single word in your sentence needs to be hashtagged. It’s an eyesore, and ineffective use of valuable caption space. Hashtag over use will kill your message as readers tend to ignore captions with too many hashtags.

Create Your Own Hashtags

Create your own brand and campaign hashtags. Why create your own hashtag? They serve as a great branding tool and can help you track campaigns. Don’t be scared to get creative and remember to pair your original hashtags with brand related and keyword hashtags for more exposure.

Update Your Hashtags!

Hashtag popularity will change with the wind. Not all your hashtags will remain effective. To get the most out of the your hashtags make sure to audit and update your hashtag lists periodically. You should even mix up hashtags from photo to photo. This is especially important now as Instagram has started to “shadow ban” accounts that use the same hashtags over and over. (A shadow ban is when your photos stop showing up under hashtag searches, even though you’ve used the hashtag in your post). For some ideas on how to find and track your hashtags read about my favorite hashtag tracking tools here.

Using hashtags correctly takes some research and time, but using my tips you’ll be able to get the most out of your hashtags and attract followers and engagement that matters. Got any questions? Leave them for me in a comment below 🙂

<3 DhariLo