It’s common practise to sprinkle hashtags randomly across social media postings, but this might backfire if you don’t have a solid hashtag strategy in place (see my previous post about banned hashtags here). A Facebook page’s organic reach may be severely diminished by utilising too many, and the damage can last for weeks or months.
Where do I even begin when developing a hashtag strategy?
An important part of developing a winning hashtag strategy before diving into each social media network in isolation is learning about your target demographic and the hashtags they really use.
Plan for Using Instagram Hashtags
Your Instagram hashtag strategy will be influenced by these two types of hashtags. You want as many people as possible to see your post, therefore you should aim to keep it towards the top of the feed in the “Top Posts” or “Most Recent” sections. Based on this, select your hashtags:
You can aim for the ‘Top Post’ and select a more popular hashtag if you can generate enough “buzz” in your community within two hours of publishing. If you don’t get any interaction with your post within two hours, it will go to the bottom of the stream.
- If you are just starting out and don’t yet have a sizable and active following, it may make sense to focus on dominating the ‘Most Recent’ section of less-used (niche) hashtags. If you want to be noticed, you shouldn’t choose the most widely used hashtags. By this, I mean hashtags that are used frequently and have a high volume of postings.
- To see how much time has passed since the most recent posts, click on the top three hashtags. Your post will likely be lost in the shuffle if new content is added to this hashtag more frequently than once every five minutes. As compared to popular, widely-used hashtags like #marketing, #fashion, and #love, staying “on top” of 30 specialty hashtags will allow you to reach 100 individuals in each. Using trending hashtags may seem like a good way to get your content in front of more people, but the reality is that you won’t be able to keep your post at the top for more than a few minutes and the likelihood that many people will notice it is quite low.
- Once you’ve settled on a target category, you can begin searching for appropriate hashtags. To find people who could be interested in what you have to say, your business, and the substance of your article, head to the search box and enter some keywords. If you click on a hashtag, you can find out how many people are subscribed to it and how often content is posted using that tag. By doing so, you may ascertain the hashtag’s popularity/specialization and decide whether to use it or not in your search for the specified type of article.
- You may use Tags Finder to find unique hashtags for each country. Remember to only use location- and caption-specific hashtags if your company is local. All Hashtags is another excellent hashtag generator that suggests hashtags based on the ones you’ve used before and highlights the trending hashtags within those suggestions.
- Avoid using any of the hundreds of restricted hashtags, most of which have to do with nefarious activities like drug trafficking or pornography, but some of which may come as a surprise. For instance, you may not be aware that the hashtag #russiangirl is off-limits. Utilizing certain hashtags will get your post deleted, lower your organic reach, and get your account banned.
- If you want to achieve your goal of staying at the top of a specific category for as long as possible, you should employ the appropriate amount of hashtags in your post. Include 30 relevant and popular hashtags to describe your content effectively. Include them anywhere in the post itself, or in the first comment (this won’t effect your organic reach).
An Approach to Using Hashtags on Facebook
The experts are split on whether hashtags on Facebook actually ‘work,’ so we kept it till last despite the fact that it has the most users of any of the social media platforms we looked at.
There is no hard and fast rule about how many hashtags you should use in a single post, but the more you utilise, the smaller your organic reach will be.
Concluding remarks
You realise that the’social’ part of social media is essential to its success, and without it, there is no reason to use it for business. Reaching a lot more people in your target audience than you otherwise would be able to is possible with a well-thought-out hashtag strategy for each social media platform. It will also increase organic traffic.