Are you a #marketer? Do you work on #socialmedia marketing?
Then, this article is a bonus for you!
“Posting nice contents on social media alone is outdated as the black and white TV, keying into current trends, trending hashtags, searchable keywords and share-ability are the new social currency”
― Jerry Oche
Ignore the first line! 😉
A hashtag is not just a thing to fill in your captions with rubbish.
It is the most effective tool to optimize your social media presence.
What is a hashtag?
A hashtag can be anything: an alphabet, a word, or even a phrase that follows the ‘#’ sign. In the marketing context, hashtags are known as a way to engage a brand with its market.
Hashtag Marketing Strategies
Here, we will be taking you to through the uses of #hashtag to feed your marketer mind.
#MakingYourBrandGrand
The brands create hashtags to portray their presence on social media. Such hashtags can be the name of the company or maybe a short, catchy tagline. The hashtag must be a representation of the brand itself. Get thorough research done on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to know whether your hashtag is seriously unique.
Give the followers of your brand with a handy hashtag, and let them use it on social media. Let it be Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, more it gets trendy, it gets easier to track the content. As the followers themselves create content for you, the hashtags can be used to gather user-generated content for further marketing purposes.
Not just that, hashtags are even more useful to promote campaigns conducted by your brand. Even without anything to do with a product, a campaign with a concept behind it can go viral on social media.
The best example is of the #icebucketchallenge which went viral in 2014. Half the people who uploaded the video had no idea what for they are freezing themselves. ALS Association got more than 1.3 million mentions within just 24 hours of Justin Bieber taking on the challenge twice in a single weekend.
Embedding a social media wall will let you display the relevant content submitted by the users directly on the website, to engage the users directly on your website via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media platform.
#EvenAtTheEvents
Has your brand got followers from around the world? Do you need worldwide followers to be a part of your event?
A hashtag acts as a powerful tool to connect people from around the globe.
As you plan an event to be organized, ask your social media team to prepare a unique hashtag for the same. Let the marketers promote it on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
The event planners and the brand usually take the hashtag to the attendees and followers in advance, so that it would be convenient for them to connect and network while or prior to the event.
Even if experts and professionals in your industry won’t be physically available at the event, let their opinions reach you through their tweets and posts. The followers can also come up with suggestions and feedbacks regarding the product or services of your brand with this hashtag,
With Social Wall like Twitter or Instagram hashtag slideshow, you can conveniently collect relevant tweets and posts with hashtags. They also do offer social walls for events to let your followers make their virtual presence with their posts and tweets.
#What’sTrending
At times, some topics go popular as people are talking a lot about it. In most of the cases, such hashtags are related to current happenings or something which went viral just for fun. These trending hashtags are just a matter of time! It may keep changing every hour.
But tracking these viral, trending hashtags to find something related to your brand or industry can be beneficial to create something worth changing the game. With a trendy hashtag, a content update can reach a massive audience.
More than just your costumers and followers, it will be viewed by a mass who has nothing to do with your product or service. But it’s free, and the idea of marketing strikes that mass, it can change the game entirely by making a part of that mass into your followers.
There are marketing tools that will help you assist in tracking trendy hashtags to optimize your social media presence. Make sure what you share about the trend must be creative and influential.
How to make the best out of Hashtags?
As you have now realized the potential of this pervasive yet powerful sign in social media, let’s know how to make the best use of it in marketing for your brand.
Social media aggregators like Taggbox and SociableKIT offers services to promote your hashtag campaigns. They will help grow your organic reach and engage users with the hashtagged user-submitted content. They also enhance interactions through hashtag walls to boost the overall SEO performance of the website.
Make sure to make your mark on social media by upgrading your marketing strategies by taking ‘#’ seriously!