What is a Hashtag and How to Use Them

Oh what’s in a hashtag? They’re everywhere on social media, but what are they, why should small businesses use them, and what are the dos and don’ts of using hashtags? In this post, we’ll break it down for you so you know when is the right time to use hashtags and what channels they work best on.

What is a hashtag?

As with anything in social media and content, there’s a lot of little moving parts you need to know and understand to see the bigger picture. Hashtags happen to be one of those moving parts. In a nutshell, a hashtag is a word or group of words put together with the # symbol preceding them. Hashtags are used to group topics together on various social media channels. You can use hashtags to search for posts on a given topic. While you can use hashtags on nearly every social media channel, they really work best on a few of them - Twitter, Instagram and most recently LinkedIn.

Why should you use hashtags for your small business?

Yes, it’s yet another tiny thing you need to think about in marketing your small business, but you’re already writing out posts anyway, so take a few seconds to write out a few hashtags. 

Hashtags help you build your brand. Using hashtags in your social posts is a great way to promote your business with a unique hashtag (like ours, #honeybeesocial). Customers can use your hashtag in their posts to show their alignment with you, which is an easy way to promote your brand without you even lifting a finger.

Hashtags are also a way for people who don’t know who you are to find you. Users on the social media channels that use hashtags heavily actually search hashtags to view content. It’s a great way of attracting cold traffic to you, helping your follower count climb and also bringing people through your funnel. And, as this article on Hootsuite outlines, using hashtags to attract your target audience is especially effective on Instagram (and now LinkedIn), as users can follow hashtags, giving them content that use the hashtag straight into their feed. The more ways people can find you and relate to your brand, the more likely they are to like, share, comment and engage with your business.

Dos and Don’ts of hashtags

As with anything in content and social media marketing, there are a few rules with hashtags you should abide by. Luckily they’re all pretty simple. Let’s start with the Dos.

DO

Use uppercase letters to differentiate between words. If you have a long hashtag, capitalising the first letter of each word will help you and users read the hashtag. Don’t worry though, there’s no difference when searching a hashtag with capitalised letters or not. Each will give you the same results.

Use hashtags for your brand. Because why not? It’s an easy and free way to promote it, works great with competitions and user generated content.

Use and find “long tail” hashtags. Like keywords in search engine optimisation, really generic hashtags like #business or #social have millions of posts using them. So, when someone goes searching for those hashtags the chance of them seeing your post is slimmer than if you used a longer hashtag like #smallbusinesssydney or #smallbusinessocialmediamarketing that directly relates to your audience and post. Longer hashtags have fewer posts using them, and so your chances of exposure increase.

DON’T

Use spaces in between your words in your hashtag. That will break that hashtag. So for example your post won’t be picked up for “small business” if you use #small business, but it definitely will if you use #smallbusiness.

Use random hashtags to gain followers or clicks. Using hashtags that are completely unrelated to your posts is a big no no. By doing this, you’re essentially making your post click bait, making you look spammy to users and not building the trust that you need to create to gain customers. Social media channels will demote and downgrade posts and accounts that do this. 

Use copious amounts of hashtags. Instagram limits the hashtag count to 30 for a post, and with good reason. You’ve worked hard on that post, so why would you want it to look spammy and desperate for clicks or likes? With Twitter you’re limited to a 140 character count so naturally you’re refrained from smashing your followers with hashtags. LinkedIn has no limit but again you will look spammy if half your post is hashtags. While the limit on Instagram is 30, 15 looks cleaner. 

Hashtag tools for researching hashtag suggestions

There are a heap of tools out there that you can use to get hashtag suggestions. If you love using Google Chrome, RiteTag has an extension you can add so it can suggest hashtags from any web page you’re on, showing you in realtime the most popular hashtags that relate to your post or text.

hashtagify.me is another tool you can try, and also has a chrome extension. Simply search a word and get suggestions as well as data based on popularity and the top influencers using those hashtags.

Alternatively, you can always go old school and start typing in a hashtag in your post and see what suggestions come up. It’s easy and free, but might be a bit time consuming.

Whether you’re on Instagram or pursuing clients on LinkedIn, hashtags are just a few taps on the keyboard to getting you additional eyes on your posts and attaching new customers. So why wouldn’t you use hashtags?

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