March 17, 2016

Hashtag 101 for Your Business Marketing Efforts

Hashtag 101 For Your Business Marketing Efforts

Hashtags — you might of heard or seen them. If you are unaware of what its purpose is, don’t fret, that’s why I’m here. This will be a guide on what is and how to use a hashtag for properly marketing your business.

What is a Hashtag?

Hashtags are those “#” symbols that you see in social media, you might have referred to that symbol as a pound sign on the phone. The hashtag symbol is one of the most effective social media marketing tools available. When the symbol is placed in front of words or phrases, hashtags can generate a significant amount of traffic and produce exposure to whatever subject it is that you are trying to convey.

Some example hashtags: #hashtag101 #winning #bestrestaurant

This method of social media exposure first started in Twitter, it was designed to label and categorize groups of tweets to be searched and found. Hashtags have grown into other social media outlets such as Facebook and Instagram. If someone is looking for the best restaurant in orange county, they might run a search on one of their social media outlets either Twitter or Facebook and type in “#bestrestaurantoc” and the hashtag will return a list of post and tweets on the corresponding topic.

How would it benefit my business?

If you didn’t know, Twitter and Facebook are now being used as search engines — crazy right? Yeah, the millenials are on that bandwagon and as a business marketing effort, you want to make sure you’re a part of it. Twitter and Facebook get more than a billion search queries per day and more and more people prefer using these outlets over other search engine apps as their resource of information. Utilizing hashtags increases your online visibility and make it easier for others to find your message.

One of my favorite parts of hashtags is that it is clickable. If someone were to click on one of your hashtags, they’ll be able to see all the post with that same hashtag.

Now that your better informed on hashtags, here are some quick tips that can help your business marketing.

1. Don’t Punctuate

As weird as it might look, don’t put commas, semi-colons, apostrophes or spaces in hashtags, this BREAKS the hashtag. “#thisis super awesome” would really just be “#thisis”. Oh and please keep it short, this will help get to the point and will be much easier to search for: #bestwebdesignoc vs #bestwebsitedesigninorangecounty – NO ONE will type in that long one, well maybe but its a very slim chance. Use hashtags that people are most likely to type in.

2. Specify!

Try to use specific titles for hashtags, if someone is search for waffle houses in orange county you might want to use “#wafflehouseoc” or “#wafflerestaurant”. If you get too general “#wafflebreakfast”, it might be overused and your message would be harder to find.

3. Don’t get carried away

Do your readers a favor — don’t get annoyingly carried away with your hashtags. Avoid #hashtagging #every #single #word #in #the #sentence. Did that hurt your brain? It hurt me while writing it, it’s pointless, annoying, can get marked as spam and that doesn’t do you any good.

Need more information on using social media to market your business? Contact us and let us help you out with your marketing needs.

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