To some, hashtags are viewed as somewhat puzzling, humorous components to social media that have transformed dialogues forever. Who hasn’t seen Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake’s take?
To your business, however, hashtags can be a pivotal tool for audience growth and brand building—you just need to know how to use them.
If you are new to hashtags, here are four basics according to Mashable:
1. A hashtag is created when the pound sign ( # ) precedes a word or grouping of words, which thus creates a short link.
2. Don’t use spaces
- Good: #ThrowbackThursday or #throwbackthursday (Capitalizations don’t matter)
- Bad: #Throwback Thursday (the link would only be “Throwback” in this case)
3. Numbers are hashtaggable, but punctuation marks aren’t.
- Good: #Top25Countdown
- Bad: #WhatWouldYouDo?
4. You can create any hashtag you’d like. There is no preset list. Simply use the pound sign before any word or set of words.
Three major social media platforms that use hashtags:
1. Twitter- As the home of the hashtag, Twitter is most often associated with the shortlinks. Trending topics can be found on the sidebar and can be filtered by location. When searching hashtags, they can be filtered by “Top,” the most popular posts, “All,” and “People you follow.” Twitter makes it easy to follow conversations, discover new accounts and become aware of buzzing discussion topics. Check out Cement’s Twitter to see how we use our hashtags.
2. Instagram- Hashtags on Instagram are used to discover new accounts, gain followers and accompany the photos you post. #ThrowbackThursday or #tbt for short, is a great example of an established hashtag that has gained significant popularity as a “challenge” or routine post account users look forward to participating in. Currently, #tbt has 104,976,604 photos that include the hashtag. Take a look at Cement’s Instagram here.
3. Facebook- Hashtags weren’t integrated into the site until June 2013, but aren’t meshing well with Facebook’s core goal of personal connectivity. Read more about why Facebook hashtags were doomed to fail.
FYI: Google+, Vine, Pinterest and Tumblr also use hashtags.
Four helpful hashtag tips:
1. Craft your brand’s voice/tone with hashtags. Your brand can become anything from sarcastic or informative, to an authority in your field, to playful.
2. When marketing a promotion, create your own hashtag. Encourage participants in the contest or event to use the special hashtag in order to track engagement. You can increase usage by incorporating a prize incentive, such as, “Earn a chance to win a free admission pass when you tweet ‘#CementPromo’”
3. Incorporate hashtags into your post; you don’t necessarily have to separate regular text from hashtags. For example, it’s redundant to tweet, “New Girl is my favorite Fox TV show. #NewGirl #FoxTV”. Simply phrase it, “#NewGirl is my favorite #FoxTV show.”
4. Pay attention to trends and engage in the popular hashtags that are relevant to your business.
If your business would like to kick off a social media campaign, contact Olivia at olivia@cementmarketing.com.