Everyone wants to know about the telephone button (#) that has now become a social media phenomenon. Whether you love or hate them, they seem to be everywhere and everyone is using them. As a marketing consultant who specializing in social media marketing I like to determine what’s working and what’s not. So do hashtags work or is it just a myth like “warming up an engine before driving”. Are people just using hashtags because it’s a popular thing to do these days, do they actually work, or are they just #Annoying?
As it turns out, they work! Here is a breakdown of how do hashtags work and 3 tips on how to make them work.
How Do Hashtags Work?
Hashtags originated on twitter but have now spread to most major social media platforms, including but not limited to Facebook, Instagram, Google+, and Pinterest. Hashtags work 3 ways to:
- Categorize Content to get found easily
- Build a following
- Promote Events
How to use Hashtags:
- Use the hashtag symbol (#) before a relevant keyword or phrase (no spaces) in a social post to categorize content to get found easily. For example: As an internet marketing consultant I would categorize my content by using the hashtag #InternetMarketing.
- Hashtags can occur anywhere in the Tweet.
- Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message will show you all the other Tweets marked with that keyword.
Do Hashtags Work?
1) Dan Zarrella conducted a study using a database of over 1.2 million Tweets to determine if hashtagged tweets would get more retweets. He found that Tweets that contain one or more hashtags were 55% more likely to be ReTweeted than Tweets that did not. Thanks to the large dataset, there is a 99.9% confidence interval that Tweets with hashtags get more ReTweets than those without.
2) Further LinchpinSEO sheds some light on why increasing twitter interactions such as Retweets, CTR, and overall engagement is so important:
- 78% of engagement with brand’s Tweets are retweets.
- 22% of engagement with brand’s are replies.
- 92% of engagement with a brand’s Tweets are Link Clicks.
3) So based on these statistics at The Marketing Garage we used hashtags as a social media marketing tool for one of our clients to determine if hashtags work to get their content found and build a following on Instagram. Here are the results of the case study.
The Results:
- Photos that didn’t use Hashtags averaged 4-7 likes.
- Photos that used Hashtags received 4x the likes averaging between 30-55 likes.
- Within the first day the page received 35 new fans.
Who were the people liking and commenting on the photos? We looked into it and found out they were people interested in aviation from all over the world. The hashtags allowed us to reach a wide range of people who we would not have been able to connect with otherwise. People who were actually interested in aviation were able to view and engage in the content.
Conclusion
Using the hashtags to categorize the client’s content and page not only got their content found but also helped build a strong fan base that continues to grow today. Hashtags are a great tool to use to categorize content and get it found by people who are looking for it.
Read more case studies from a marketing consultant that moves the needle and learn about why winning at social media marketing is like winning the French Open.
3 Tips On How To Create Hashtags That Get Found
- Find popular hashtags that are relevant to your brand. You can do this by using tools such as Hashtagify or Rite Tag to name a few. Making sure the hashtags are relevant to your brand is important, if they aren’t your content won’t get found and it will cause your fans confusion.
- Once you find one relevant to you brand make sure to us it consistently. Lack of consistency may cause some social posts to go unseen by fans that search for your posts searching for the specific hashtag they know you use.
- Make sure you don’t use too many words in your hashtag. One mistake users make when using a hashtag is thinking the point of a hashtag is to write a complete thought or an entire sentence. For example: #ThisIsOneOfTheMostObnoxiousUsesOfHashtags OR #When #you #use #them #before #every #word #in #your #social #post!
Chelsea Maidment is a social media marketing brand mechanic at The Marketing Garage; an award-winning company of internet marketing and branding consultants. Find out how a proven diagnostic approach can help you stop guessing and start knowing when it comes to your marketing. Visit www.TheMarketingGarage.ca.
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The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto digital marketing agency that has extensive experience in cultivating effective digital marketing strategies. We help businesses in many different sectors across North America fix their marketing. Our data-driven mix of SEO and digital marketing process is like no other.
