A social media hashtag is a tag for your marketing content which creates a short, clickable online link at the start of your post and is written as a single word using your keyboard upper case pound sign as a (#). These appear as labels for you subject matter to help others on social media easily find the exact online content and information that is of interest to them.
Hashtags, therefore, should be an essential part of your online marketing strategy because this is the key to both growing and also maintaining your following on your social media sites.
Which means that it’s really crucial for you to use your hashtags in such a manner that gets you your desired results for growing your audience on social media. And although the actual concept is straightforward, it’s easy to make commonplace mistakes.
Here are 5 mistakes to highlight ways to overcome these on your social media sites…
Your hashtag is too generic: Just make sure you don’t select a hashtag name or phrase that’s too generic like #business or #marketing or #social media. Because even though these words and phrases may be appropriate for your audience, you’ll just be swamped by all the competition online, which means people searching will have little chance of coming across your post. Instead, choose a more specific keyword target term for your post and make it long enough that it won’t be used by others doing the same posts online for social media.
Don’t make it complicated: For your hashtags to be effective, they certainly want to catch attention and be easily remembered, otherwise people searching online just won’t get it and they’ll move on. You want to create hashtags that stop people in their tracks and if it’s just a common word or its too long or over complicated, it won’t stick in their mind and they won’t then share it with others. So make your hashtags short, to the point and looking unique.
Don’t use outdated hashtags: Online trends come and go quite quickly and some popular terms from last month, even last week, become dated. So, do some research to find what’s popular and trending by searching on Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest …and check to make sure how popular these are before using them. Instead tweak them into your own words that are suitable for your business.
Failing to promote your hashtags: It might seem an obvious statement, but hashtags don’t promote themselves. It’s up to you to deliberately and vigorously promote your hashtags to get the people you want to see then and then use them. And there are two ways to do this… It goes without saying that one way you can do this is online by way of social media. But you can also be creative and use offline promotions such as printing your hashtag on your marketing materials such as flyers, brochures and business cards and then point your hashtags out to people and tell them to use them.
Spamming: Finally, never, ever feel the compulsion to blast your followers online with numerous hashtags. And don’t think, if you find some favourites, that you can use them in every one of your posts. That’s because people will find them boring and spammy, they’ll be put off and your hostages will just be ignored over time.
So in summary, make sure you are always committed to thinking precisely about the words and phrases you use when hash-tagging and make sure every hashtag you use are relevant to your market and that they will get attention, create interest and as a result, attract the right audience that you specifically want for you and your business.
Leave a Reply