Rethinking Your Hashtag Strategy

Using social media for business has become one of the most popular forms of marketing, not least of all because it’s cheap to implement and gives a good return if you get it right. From Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, each channel offers a slightly different format, but the one thing that they all have in common is hashtags.

Hashtags may just seem like a way to add a pithy statement onto the end of a post (#sorrynotsorry!) but there’s actually a lot more to hashtags, and getting them right can take your engagement to new levels.

If someone clicks on a hashtag within a post, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter will all aggregate a feed containing only posts with the same hashtag, and if you choose a term which is well-searched, you could end up being seen by a much broader audience than just your followers. This is what leads to more engagement and a potentially increased follower count.

How to choose the right hashtags

The first element is choosing the right hashtags. Not only do they need to be relevant to your posts and your business, you need to make sure they’re hashtags which are being used and searched on a regular basis, otherwise you’re wasting your time and shouting into an empty room.

Making hashtags look better

Secondary to getting the correct hashtags is making them look good. Posts which have hashtags littered throughout the body of text, or bunched into a group directly beneath can look haphazard and messy. We always suggest, especially when using Instagram and Facebook, leaving at least four line breaks between your body text and your hashtags. Grouping them together in this way will make your posts look neater and far less spammy.

How many hashtags should I include?

Finally, using the correct amount of hashtags is also important. Twitter has a character limit, so you’ll always be limited by how many hashtags you can use in a tweet. However, Instagram allows you to use up to thirty hashtags in a post, and we strongly recommend that you use every available slot.

Using 30 hashtags in a post may seem daunting, but since we started using all 30 slots in our own Instagram posts, we’ve seen a huge increase in likes and comments – double and sometimes even triple the amount of interaction than we had beforehand. So, you see, this isn’t just a stab in the dark, it’s something we’ve tried ourselves and have had quantifiable results with.

We do, however, appreciate the fact that you don’t always have the time or knowledge to spend time working out which hashtags you should be using to have the biggest impact. This is why we’ve devised our Instagram audit service.

During an audit, we’ll take a look at your feed and give you a professional, objective report, detailing where your feed is doing well, where it could stand to improve and we can also include a list of 30, 50 or 100 hashtags, personalised to your business, depending on your requirements.

Signing up is easy, and you’ll have your report in no time, allowing you to improve your Instagram efforts and make use of the hashtags to take your social media marketing to the next level.

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