What are hashtags?
Hashtags (#) are a means of highlighting keywords or key phrases on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. A hashtag is simply a word or phrase preceded by the symbol (#), and they are used to group messages and make them easier to find. Hashtags are a great way to tag or label a piece of content and select a niche community on any social media platform. When you click on these symbols in a social media post, you will see other posts using the same tag.
Hashtags are a great way to help connect with people who share the same interests on social media. They are also a great way to help organize content and track campaigns. It is a powerful tool for attracting new followers and engaging with customers for businesses.
These symbols can help you reach a larger audience and create a more engaged community when used correctly. You need to make your content, optimize your content, and add a hashtag to your content piece.
Types of Hashtags
There are majorly seven types of hashtags that one should know. These have different applications and should be appropriately used while placing them in your post. Also, these types will help you target a much more niche audience and generalize your post to the audience.
Using all of these tags at the right time is an essential digital marketing activity. You can create a hashtag campaign and content marketing to get the best results.
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Industry Hashtags
Tags related to the industrial industry can be classified as high competition hashtags. Many people use them regularly, and they have been tagged on millions of posts in the past. As a result, it cannot be easy to achieve visibility for your posts if you use these tags. However, if you manage to get your posts seen, they can reach a large audience. These hashtags are often seen in the trending section.
For example #Photographer, #blogger.
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Niche Hashtag
If you want to attract followers interested in a more specific aspect of your industry or business, niche hashtags are the way to go. They are less popular than general tags but will increase engagement with people who have more specific search terms.
For example #USABlogger #WeddngPhotographer.
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Brand Hashtags
Brand hashtags are brands that have a massive reach in the market. Collaborating or associating your brand with them can be a game-changer as these brands are already developed and have huge traffic on their social media handle. The hashtag engagement with these brands can increase your visibility.
For example #nike #adidas #JustDoIt.
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Community Hashtags
Social media is not all about community and joining a particular community is a challenging aspect to work upon. As easy it is to join a community tribe, the easier it is to use the community hashtags. Community hashtags are the ones that target furthermore to a specific audience or community.
These are more specific and targeted when compared to niche or brand hashtags. While posting on social media use 4-5 community tags.
For example #coldplayfans #lgbtq+
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Location Hashtags
Location hashtags are those tags that have a location name in them. These tags narrow down the search based on a particular location. It can also have activity done in the location. You can use such hashtags and posts for a location-based targeted audience.
For example #Americanblogs #mumbaistreetfood.
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Event Hashtags
These hashtags are used to increase the participants’ engagement in an event. The tags contain a specific event. These tags can create a lot of user-generated content as the event organizer can ask the participant to post about the event using this hashtag.
For example #BrandvedaWebinar #VibrantNewYork.
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Celebration Hashtag
This hashtag is used majorly whenever a festival or a day is celebrated. These hashtags can be used by businesses to target a particular day, and the audience participating in the discussion of the celebration will get the impression of your post.
For example #WorldCancerDay #RepublicDay #Christmas.
Ways to find the best Hashtags:
Here are the best ways to find the top and trendy hashtags related to your business.
Monitor social media influencers and competitors
It is one of the most critical activities to be done by any business. Keeping a careful eye out for the competitors’ posts on social media platforms and analyzing what works for them can benefit your business. What works for them might even work for you as well.
Use hashtag-making tools.
Finding the right hashtag can be tiresome and time-consuming. To increase your efficiency, you should use tools. Various tools can generate tags within seconds. Sometimes, you must purchase these tools, but their premium services will help you.
You can use these hashtag tools:
- Rite tag
- Hashtagify
- Sprout Social
- #Hash Me
- Instavast
Know which Hashtags are trending
Keep supervising the social media trends and their hashtags. Always post your posts using the popular hashtag and the trending hashtag. It would help if you used tools such as Ritetag to generate trending tag suggestions based on your content and give you reports of hashtag analytics and campaign hashtags.
Get a Social Media listening tool.
Social listening is a technique where you monitor what people say about your competitors and you. Any bad experience of any competitor’s customer can be your opportunity to convert that customer to you. A tool like Hootsuite lets your brand use search streams to discover which hashtags are the best for each social network you are on.
How to Use Best Hashtag in Instagram?
You can follow these tips to use the best hashtags on Instagram or business profiles.
1) Using Instagram Insights to understand which hashtags work
Having switched over to an Instagram business account, you gain access to posting insights. These tell you how many impressions from tags your posts have received.
To access these insights, tap View Insights below the post on the left side of your screen and then swipe up until you see all the relevant information for that one specific post. Swipe up until they are there. You can use multiple hashtags, check their insights and find out what works the best for you.
2) Using Instagram Hashtags in stories
If you see an Instagram icon on a page with Stories, it means that public profiles are using the hashtag in their Stories posts. You can do that by using a tag sticker on Instagram or simply typing the hashtag in an Instagram story post.
3) Don’t Use Banned or inappropriate Hashtags.
It does not mean that you cannot use the actual word or phrase tagged by hashtags; instead, they will be limited to only those who have posted publicly and had their name associated with the tag.
The only way to know if a tag is banned is to check it before using it. To put this in place, every time you add a new tag, try using one that’s not banned and see if users jump the bandwagon or are deterred from engaging with your content.
Get rid of tags like #followme and #tagsforlikes, which ask for likes without providing anything worthwhile in return (i.e., being beneficial). These types of tags will attract bots, spammers, and other Instagram users who have no intention of actually engaging with your brand on an organic level.
4) Avoid using repetitive or irrelevant hashtags.
When posting on Instagram, avoid using the same hashtags for every post. If you tag a post with #wanderlust, it must be something globetrotters will want to comment on and share – like your content with an adventure theme. It’s not about getting seen by a lot of people.
It’s about getting the right people to see who cares most about what you have to say! Pick and Select keywords for each post individually to complement one another while increasing engagement and followership numbers.
5) Clarify your idea in the hashtag
Hashtags are often used on social media to make it easier to find specific posts that may interest them. They can be a string of words, but sometimes they create problems when it’s unclear where one word ends and the next begins. Brands have also picked up tag trends like #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter without understanding the context, resulting in PR disasters involving their brand image.
Conclusion:
The marketers on the digital platforms are not missing any chance to optimize social media. Also, digital marketers create various marketing campaigns through email marketing, marketing automation, online marketing, content marketing, content creation, and many more. All of the tiny aspects of digital marketing count as many opportunities.
So, even hashtags can play a pivotal role in social media marketing. Social media marketing and the relevance of hashtags have been important since the start. Even though these tags are not considered essential, the above article has shown how crucial these hashtags can be. Using hashtags in marketing has been done by brands for a long time and will be continued.
It is essential to stay consistent with your content creation, content marketing, or content optimization. Staying consistent with the content posting will give you positive results.