The purpose of hashtag (#) is to draw attention, promote and connect with your target audience within your social media accounts. This simple symbol helps to increase your engagement, better brand your company, and get found.
Twitter created hashtags as a way to make finding people to follow easier. And since then it has become an important part of marketing on all social media platforms.
You’re not alone if you’ve been wondering, what is hashtagging, or what is hashtag used for or even how do you hashtag, or how does hashtag work.
So what does it mean to hashtag something and what are hashtags?
What Is A Hashtag Used For?
Hashtags are the easiest way to find a specific topic, event, or a conversation on social media. Here are some of the benefits of incorporating hashtags into your marketing strategy,
They help to bring your target audience to you. The hashtags you use to make your posts searchable. And your ideal customer is searching specific hashtags looking for information pertaining to your products and services. Using these hashtags increases your chances of being found.
Improve your clickthrough rates (CTR). Posts that use hashtags get more engagement than those that do not. The more engagement you have the more clickthrough rates are twice as much engagement as those that don’t and increase clickthrough rates.
Like-minded people can interact. Searching for the things that interest you on social media allows you to connect with other people with the same interests and join conversations.
Show support for social issues
Staying connected by showing support for social causes or issues that are important to your company. Using hashtags for issues or events such as International Women’s Day, or promoting mental health awareness.
How To Use Hashtags
Just adding some hashtags that you think will be relevant to your market isn’t going to get you the results that you are looking for. You’ll need to create a strategic content marketing approach with popular/trending hashtags. This requires hashtag keyword research, and tools that will help you to uncover which tags are driving more engagement, traffic, and click-throughs to your website.
There are plenty of hashtag analytic tools. But one of the best hashtag analytics tools is Google hashtag analytics. By tracking this information not only will you be able to better target your audience and provide them with valuable content you’ll also discover new tags as well.
Another handy tool is hashtag analytics historical. This tool provides you with information for hashtags such as total posts, impressions, and finds influencers within the market.
When you do this here are some of the benefits you’ll receive,
Increase engagement with your followers
When you add a highly searched-for hashtag to your posts you’re allowing potential customers to become part of your conversation. This increased engagement makes your post more visible.
The right hashtag leads to greater engagement through likes, shares, comments, and new followers.
Build brand awareness with branded hashtags
Making your own branded hashtag is an effective way to promote your business and steer conversations.
For example, a non-profit that helps cancer patients financially branded a hashtag #WeGetTo during one of their campaigns. It’s about being grateful for the things that we get to do and one day the people dying of cancer won’t. This hashtag is most-used throughout Long Island NY (where he lived), and Carolina (his Alumni). Allowing his story to quickly spread and raise over $1million dollars for his foundation.
Add context to a social media post
A hashtag is a simple way to contextualize what you’re talking about. This quick summary adds the much-needed extra characters to your posts making clear what the posts are about.
Hashtag Search
There are hashtag search tools that search hashtags with real-time data and insights on different social media platforms. You’ll uncover the popularity ranking, related hashtags, trends, and much more.
Hashtags For Marketing Agencies
It’s not easy to effectively utilize hashtag tracking google analytics, identity-related and popular hashtags. At Abstrax Web, we have the tools, experience, and know-how to create an effective marketing campaign utilizing hashtags.
Hashtags on websites, SEO hashtags, and SEO tagging are important. There is often confusion surrounding hashtags, tags, and keywords. While these are all ways to search for content there are some differences that you should understand.
Hashtag vs Keyword
Hashtags will help you to find a single post on the platform it was posted on – Instagram, Twitter, etc.
While keywords help you to find specific pages and posts through search engine results for your website.
Tag vs Hashtag
Tags are labels that you use in your blog posts.
Hashtags are similar to a tag as it helps to organize your content within social networking sites.
How To Create A Hashtag
Here are some of the best methods of creating popular hashtags for your social media network content that will improve engagement, increase your following and get more customers,
Monitor social media influencers and competitors
Check out what your competitors are doing. Perform competitive analysis on social media to find out which hashtags they use most often, and how many hashtags they use for each post. This intel will help you find engaging hashtags for your target audience.
Use hashtag tools
There are both free and paid hashtag tools that allow you to search any hashtag and uncover its popularity and trends. They can also give you suggestions for ones to use based on your search.
Get a social media listening tool
Hootsuite is one of the best ways to discover hashtags for your brand depending on which social network you’re on. You can simply search streams to find the most popular and the most effective from a single platform.
Find related hashtags
Related hashtags are often more specific and less popular hashtags, but they will help you to connect to a more targeted audience. You can find these within most social networks.
Top Digital Marketing Hashtags Campaigns
Regardless of what type of website or what industry you are in, Abstrax Web can find hashtags for web design firms, hashtags for advertising agencies, hashtags for web design, hashtags for alternative health sites, and more.
Here are some web design hashtags examples,
#webdesign
#webdesigner
These are the most popular hashtag web design and also have the most posts associated with them. This means that your content could get lost in the search.