Hashtags are everywhere and anyone who uses social media must have seen a bunch of hashtags with posts. But why are hashtags used? What is the importance of hashtags in social media marketing? How to use different types of hashtags effectively? These are the common questions people ask about hashtags and their importance.
Using a trending and popular hashtag can help you boost your social media posts and gain more followers.
What are Hashtags?
Hashtags are words or phrases that are followed by a hash or pound (#) symbol that is used to group various social media posts together and relate them to a topic. For eg: If you search for #FIFAWORLDCUP, thousands of pictures and videos will pop up which shows that all of them used the same hashtag. These were first used on sites that have their data unorganized and in programming languages like C. Later, Twitter used it to group similar tweets and after its popularity, Instagram and Facebook started using them as well.
What is the role of Hashtags?
Hashtags are small powerful words that can create hype for your business or a campaign. Relevant hashtags will always go a long way in an effective social media marketing campaign or attracting your target audience.
To know the importance of hashtags and how they can benefit you, read further.
1. Create User Engagement- With the help of engaging and appealing hashtags, you can attract the audience to be a part of any campaign or movement. Hashtags tend to generate massive user engagement if they gain popularity or go viral. Creating a quirky and unique hashtag should be a vital part of social media marketing.
2. Create Brand Awareness- Having a customized hashtag may be a powerful way of advertising your company. Branded hashtags include the name of a company or they can also include their tagline. This will help you track the performance of your campaign simply by focusing on the branded hashtag and user-generated content. If any user includes your hashtag in their post, your social media profile gains visibility.
3. Adds Context to Posts- A hashtag is an easy way to provide context to your post and what it conveys without taking up valuable character space. On Twitter, the character limit is 280 and many times the message cannot fit into the character limit. Using hashtags can show that your post is related to something personal or general etc.
4. To Support Social Issues- Brands are not always centered around business. The audience also expects a business to support social causes that show its humanitarian side. If your business supports environmental causes or sustainability issues, you can share posts with hashtags like #ecofriendly, #sustainibility, or #Greenearth that show your commitment to the cause.
5. Allows your Audience to Track you- Many users not only follow other users on Instagram or Linkedin, but they also follow hashtags. This technique also helps new consumers to locate your business, for example, if you include #design in your posts, anybody who follows that hashtag will see your most recent post on their feed.
Hashtags have proven to be quite effective for social media marketing and are extremely easy to use. Though hashtags alone cannot boost your engagement coupled with quality content can generate more user engagement, promote various campaigns and build brands. To effectively use hashtags for your social media marketing, ensure that you get in touch with the professionals at KolorFirst. Give your business the much-needed edge with the right strategy framed for different social media platforms.
