Hashtag Strategy

What are hashtags 

Hashtags are words attached to the “#” to indicate a keyword or topic. People use hashtags to connect with others in specific online niches. For businesses, it’s a really good way to reach your ideal demographic. In this article, I am going to dive into different ways that you can use hashtags to maximize your business’ potential in the digital world. 

Tapping into community hashtags 

Community hashtags are a way to connect with people who are like minded when it comes to a particular subject or share a similar interest. Brands often create hashtags to go with their business. For my restaurant clients, I create a hashtag around the name of the brand like “#daedaluscambridge”. What these hashtags can do, is help build a community around your brand. The more people that use your community hashtag, the more exposure your business will get on social media. 

Effective hashtag engagement 

To go off of community hashtags, it is important to have one but it is also important to engage with others. You want to be engaging with community hashtags in your ideal demographic. Along with these community hashtags, you should also be engaging with local hashtags, broader niche hashtags, specific niche hashtags etc. 

Now the question is, what does this engagement look like? With this, you need to be careful. Acting too “spammy” can negatively affect your account. You want these engagements to be authentic. Read the whole caption. A lot of times, people will ask a question prompting you to answer in the comments. Respond to the caption in the comments, it shows that you are genuinely engaging with the post. A lot of times they will engage in return! 

How to choose the right hashtags 

When choosing hashtags for feed posts, you want to make sure you are paying attention to the number under each hashtag. This number indicates how many people have used the hashtag. 

For example, if there are 2 raffles going and you know that 1000 people entered one and 100 people entered the other, you would obviously choose to enter the one with 100 people because you have a higher chance of winning. Same thing applies to hashtags. Hashtags with over a million uses are typically very competitive & saturated. Your posts will be lost in a sea of millions of other posts. 

Avoiding super broad hashtags that are overused will put you one step closer to growing your account. Having a good mixture of hashtags with the majority of them being under 300K is a strategy that will definitely help you reach more people. 

Target audience hashtags 

Not only is engaging with your target audience hashtags a good strategy, but using them on your own posts is also key.

While using #smallbusiness is great, there are many better hashtags that you can use to directly connect with your target audience. The reason why #smallbusiness is not ideal is because the people who are using these hashtags are mostly other small businesses. And while it's great to have relationships with other business owners, you want to tap into hashtags that your target audience is using. 

How Kay Nicole Media can help your brand

Kay Nicole Media can help you come up with multiple groups of hashtags for your brand to rotate through. Having a good mixture of all the different types of hashtags is a key piece of the equation that social media requires to be successful. Click here to schedule a call with me to get your hashtag game on point!