In today’s digital world, communication and awareness are the seeds of social media platforms. Sitting in one country, you can now make friends in another part of the world through Facebook. Instagram has become the best-rated platform for most influencers who have marked this medium as an earning channel.
YouTube is full of videos and shorts that can be used for brand promotion, education, or simply entertainment. So, truth be told, we live in a world of social media platforms with endless capabilities and an inherent engaging nature. Leveraging these interactive media to increase your brand’s market penetration and outreach is indeed the most feasible decision.
But the competition on these platforms is immense and you need smart but result-yielding strategies to succeed in the endeavour. This is where hashtags come into the picture. These are not just random words or phrases you give in your posts or comments. Rather, these serve as the keywords or connecting words that will make your content visible to the intended users.
However, mastering the use of correct and appropriate hashtags that will establish an instant connection between your post and the targeted audience requires dedication and a bit of a strategic approach. So, besides hiring a professional for social media marketing services, read this following discussion to know the correct usage of social media hashtags for enhanced engagement and brand outreach.
Why use social media hashtags for your posts?
Before learning the strategies for mastering the use of hashtags for your upcoming social media posts, let’s have a brief understanding of their significance. It will provide you with the clarification needed to invest your time and effort in drawing up the strategies and finding the best hashtags for the platforms.
- Higher discoverability and visibility: Almost a hundred posts are made every second across different social media platforms with the same intent as yours. So, if you want your target audience to notice your profile or brand, you need to make your posts more discoverable and hashtags serve as the best weapon. These phrases allow your post to appear on the search results of other users once they enter the specific keyword in the social media’s internal search engine.
- Enhanced engagement: Another crucial reason to use hashtags is to increase the engagement rate of your social media posts. The more relevant your hashtags are, the more interactive your content will be for your target audience. They will be able to connect with your brand easily or acknowledge your intent. Building a strong community relationship with the target audience becomes easier with the proper choice of hashtags.
- Improved brand awareness: Let’s say you want to use social media platforms as a channel for popularizing your brand and marketing your services or products. Using hashtags will make your brand more visible and approachable for the target audience. In the long run, you can build a strong sense of loyalty and trust between your brand and the users, thereby driving a higher amount of organic traffic.
- Better lead generation: Once you use relevant and popular hashtags for social media posts, you can redirect your target audience to the official website. The more engaging and promising the posts are, the more will be your leads through organic traffic. You can also leverage these phrases to promote your online social media campaigns and increase participation rates.
Strategic uses of hashtags for social media posts
Using any random phrases or words as hashtags for your social media posts won’t generate the expected results you have forecasted. Instead, you need to master the art of choosing the hashtags for individual posts depending on several internal and external variables. In the below section, we have introduced a few tricks to weaponize the hashtags for promoting and marketing your brand, products, or services across different social media channels.
Finding trending hashtags used by influencers from the same domain
Your first task will be to search the most used and trending hashtags in the same domain as your brand or product. For example, let’s say you want to promote a new range of cosmetics or apparel that has been launched recently.
So, find the hashtags mostly used by the influencers in the fashion or apparel domain. It will help you understand the phrases that will act as a catalyst for making your posts more visible and relevant to the target audience.
Using personalized hashtags for branding
If you want to use social media platforms to establish a solid foundation for your brand’s identity, you can include customized hashtags. These will be specific to your brand only, thereby increasing the discoverable rate and relevance of your posts.
For example, if your brand name contains a word like “Apple”, you can create your hashtag with the same word and use it in every post. Although it will take time to build the identity, brand-specific custom hashtags are beneficial in establishing a specific identity.
Leverage metrics and analytics for hashtags
Nowadays, several tools are available on the market that will help you find the most relevant hashtags for any post intent or keyword. You can also check the popularity or usage rate of these phrases using the analytical dashboards. This will help you track the performance of the hashtags you have planned to use for your next social media post and accordingly modify the hashtag list you have prepared.
Maintaining consistency and relevance in hashtag choices
Let’s say you want to upload three posts periodically for your new product range or any other service. If the hashtags for each post are not similar or consistent, it will not compel your target audience to visit the official website or click on the product link mentioned in the post.
Hence, it’s imperative to maintain consistency in hashtag choice. It will help you make the posts more relevant and credible for the target audience, thereby influencing their actions and having the ball in your court.
Using community hashtags for social media posts
Lastly, leverage the community or group hashtags for your social media posts. For example, if you are a photographer and want to build an identity, use the hashtags that different photography communities are using for their brand image. It’s a form of entering an already established pool of audience without having to worry about creating a brand new one for yourself.
Conclusion
Hashtags serve as one of the best tools for promoting your brand and increasing the engagement rate of your social media posts. However, appropriate strategies are needed to create a relevance and connection between your posts and the target audience. Since choosing the most influential hashtags requires skills and market knowledge, it would be best to collaborate with professional social media marketing services.
