Tuesday, August 2, 2016

How to Create a Hashtag Just for Your Business

With so many advertisements, billboards and commercials in our face, it's tough to find one without an added hashtag. In the late '90s, phone numbers were slowly replaced by AOL keywords and websites. Eventually social media handles made their way onto ads.


Now businesses create a hashtag for consumers to find more information about a product or service. Whether it's a branded term, phrase or call to action, hashtags increase social media engagement.


When you create a hashtag, you give users a new way to get in touch with your business on social. Or users can simply engage in the conversation happening around that hashtag. This is just another way for consumers to engage, discuss and connect with businesses on social media.


However, you can't discount the power of a successful hashtag for your business.


Reasons to Create a Hashtag


Creating a hashtag for your business can have a lot of benefits. Essentially, hashtags give you additional strength toward customer engagement. Not only that, but hashtags tend to be great marketing resources.


Certain hashtags work like call-to-action phrases where users can interact with brands. By using them, you're giving users another method to remember you.




For example, Minute Maid uses the hashtag #doingood. The brand gives you a source of conversation about what it means to “do something good.” But Minute Maid also hopes you'll use this hashtag the next time you think of #doingood or drinking its products.


When to Use Hashtags


People use hashtags for several different things. For example, some of the most optimal hashtags uses include:



  • Promotions

  • Events

  • Contests

  • Product Launches

  • Career Opportunities

  • Cross-Channel Discussions

  • Targeting


All of these examples require some sort of conversation. And for company-specific hashtags, they should entice discussion and ultimately engagement.


Benefits of Creating a Hashtag


To help spread the word about your product or service, you need a source of engagement. Hashtags continually prove to be great resources for engagement. So when you successfully create a hashtag for your business, other benefits include:



  • Optimize for Discovery: Hashtags are basically another organic output for your content. If you optimize your hashtags and use phrases or keywords pertaining to your industry, you're more discoverable.

  • Increase Traffic: Like we mentioned above, hashtags make your brand discoverable. Once you're easier to discover, you're likely to see higher social media traffic. Hashtag searches occur on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all the time.

  • Showcase Brand Advocates: Your brand advocates are trusted sources. In fact, Nielsen discovered 92% of consumers trust brand advocates over businesses. Hashtags are a great way to help showcase brand advocate recommendations.





  • Measure Your Efforts: By using third-party social media management software like Sprout Social, you can track hashtags within your most important networks. Hashtag analytics gives you insights into what's resonating with customers or what's falling flat. Having the extra data could make all the difference.

  • Cross Networking: A nice feature of hashtags is you can use them across channels. This will help your cross-channel promotions and make it easier to use hashtags for each major network.







How to Create a Hashtag


Now that you have an idea of when and why, you're probably wondering exactly how to create a hashtag. Before you start coming up with clever phrases or keywords, you have to know your end goal.


Like we mentioned earlier, hashtags have the chance to increase traffic, clicks and engagement. All these things should factor into your social media ROI strategy. So before you start, consider your hashtag goals.


For example, you might want to:



  • Increase brand conversations with your company

  • Be more visible on a specific social network

  • Find hashtags related to you

  • Increase total link clicks

  • Measure total reach

  • Increase mentions

  • Have better grasp of social media trends


These goals could detail your social media marketing efforts more efficiently. Just remember to have an end goal before you create a hashtag.


Determine Your Social Network


Once you have your goals down, it's time to determine the social network you want to use. The list of goals above can apply to specific social networks. So it's critical to know where you'll promote your hashtag.


Depending on your goals, your network could change in importance. If you're creating a branded hashtag that generally supports your company, you could be safe for any social network.


However, here are a few things to consider before choosing a network for your hashtags:


Twitter Hashtags


Hashtags started on Twitter. So you know this is the perfect space to use hashtags for discovery, conversations and hopping on major trends. As a business, it's smart to use hashtags on Twitter for timely events. If you're using a popular keyword in your hashtag, you have the chance to get more eyes on your Tweet.




Tweets with hashtags have advantages over Instagram hashtags because you can link each Tweet. While Instagram allows links in the bio, every Tweet could have a hashtag and a link. This makes it less confusing to get customers from social media to your marketing pages.


Also, Twitter's search features make it simple for branded hashtags. These hashtags are unique to a brand, but are easily discoverable from other Tweets. This is why so many brands do social media campaigns on Twitter. For most businesses, it's hard to go wrong with this channel.


Instagram Hashtags


One area you might not want to promote Twitter hashtags is with visual content. While Twitter supports images and videos, users tend to engage more with visual content on Instagram. This platform is perfect for contests, promotions and other heavily-visual content.






If you take a wrong turn, make it work in your favor #WhatMovesYou #ballet #dancelife


A video posted by DegreeWomen (@degreewomen) on





Instagram hashtags are frequently searched, so your chance of discovery is more likely. However, Instagram hashtags aren't very cross-network promotional. While you can link to your Facebook or Twitter in your bio, typically you want to save that space for your promotional or marketing site.


A major benefit of Instagram hashtags is you can use up to 30 per post. Brevity is essential with hashtags. But you can hide hashtags on Instagram. This lets you avoid over tagging posts and boring your current followers.


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