How to make Creative use of hashtags in social media?

Social media marketing or SMM refers to the use of social media for the benefit of the company, especially for maintaining the relationship with the existing customers, making them rabid customers and to reach out to new and more people and make them aware of the company to create more customer numbers. Social media marketing helps an organisation or company to reach people and promote their ideas, motto and mission, increasing the opportunity for the company to provide its service and gain profit.

The Importance of Social Media in Today’s Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing is one of the most essential key services of digital marketing. Very important in the present scenario. It is important to be present on social media platforms to reach billions of people. From Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and many more such famous and engaging social media platforms results in good and have resulted in making many small businesses or start-ups successful.

Understanding the Demographics of Social Media Users

To know how to reach and grab attention of every specific generation, good knowledge of demographics is required. Like, Instagram is said and believed to reach people from teens till adults, and on the other hand, Facebook works well with comparatively older and elderly people. These social media platforms are great to reach the target audiences, simply by using those ads on the platform, by creating a post regarding the products and services, sale as well as content written about the company and business. Along with these, one of the most important or key tactics to get to the desired target audience is using hashtags.

The Power Of Hashtags In Social Media Marketing

Hashtags are a very essential and integral part of a social media marketing strategy. The function of the hashtag is to simply label the content with words that have reach, it will simply increase the visibility of the content. Now, social media campaigns are incomplete without the use of hashtags as the feature of the hashtag is clear:

• Hashtags are a great way of finding social media updates and labelling your work will help with its visibility in social media.
• The use of the hashtag is simple, allowing your content to be discoverable.
• A hashtag follows a theme, and by following the common theme or interest, it gets easier to connect and engage with the other social media users, making it possible to increase the reach.
• Hashtags, no doubt, increase awareness. The content is discovered by people, not only the existing customers but also the new people by the use of hashtags. Hence, increasing the reach, awareness of the content and promoting the company.

It is evident that hashtags are a great help to gain maximum reach, but the use of hashtags must be done in an effective way to gain the desired result. When the use of hashtags is done right, it can benefit in many ways like generating exposure and audience engagement, exactly what is required for the business or the company to grow. It is clear that by using social media platforms the focus can be on the target audience, right hashtags in social media can be fundamental growing towards the right direction.

Best Practices for Hashtag Use

Expand your knowledge about using hashtags by using these simple ways in social media marketing:

Avoid using unnecessary hashtags It is necessary to know which hashtag will work under or suit the content. Social media is filled with a lot of content, and it is necessary to use appropriate hashtags and not all the hashtags ever. Many options are there on social media to promote your content, the most famous are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. These three platforms are used by every kind of business and hence, a large audience has their respective accounts in these platforms at least. This crowd makes it perfect to upload your content for promoting your business. Along with uploading the content, one needs to make sure that the content reaches its target audience, for that one uses proper and sufficient hashtags. This way there will be a desired audience engaged and not the unnecessary crowd that will affect sooner or later.

Be specific Choose those hashtags that bring you your desired audience, as mentioned above as well. The focus on a specific audience is to get the engagement of the people who are benefitted and will be beneficial for the company or organisation. At the end of the day, the main idea is to gain credibility and profit from the niche or target audience. In the process of gaining maximum beneficial responses by engaging the target audience, the significance of unique hashtags is great. The hard work is real when the search for unique and specific hashtags is considered.

Unique hashtags’ significance is, it will make the content stand out. If the content is uploaded with generic hashtags, chances are the content will be lost between those thousands of contents floating in various platforms with same and generic hashtags.

To find those effective, unique hashtags you need to search deeper in the social media world and get the smaller yet fine-tuned focus hashtags that are appropriate for the business content. You can relate the hashtags to use as a keyword, effective when used right. The effectiveness of hashtags also depends on the different social media platforms.

Utilize trending hashtags Trending simply refers to currently popular and widely discussed online. Widely discussed online simply means famous on social media websites or platforms, and people using social media platforms are talking about it or engaging with the subject or a trending topic. Now, this is the opportunity to grab those trending hashtags and use them in your content. This has to be done during the time of good engagement as the word or hashtag or keyword is not going to be always trending. In this way, you can attract the crowd to your content by using trending keywords. Make sure the hashtag is relevant to the content you wish to share, and not use any trending hashtag for the sake of engagement.

Research Do the research regarding the use of the hashtag, if the hashtag is actually used by the netizen. Do not use any keyword which contributes nothing to engagement. Also, make sure that the hashtags you use are not used by any other brand or company as a personal promotion, this will confuse the crowd and why would you want that. Do not ever get involved in controversial hashtags for clout, like political, religious or protest. It is best to stay away from such an event of negativity as it will divert the crowd and will not promote your company’s agenda or motto. Remember, a hashtag plays a similar role as a key word, so do your research carefully and use the hashtags vigilantly.

Create brand engagement Well hashtags will do the needful, but do not over use it. It is advised that do not use the hashtags while conversing with the audience, it seems unnecessary. Instead, use those conversations for trust building and let the hashtags do the required engagement. Do not always use the hashtags, sometimes those are not required, as mentioned above. For example, a re-tweet or a reply, avoid using these hashtags when they are not required. Keep the marketing to your posts and out of your customer dialogue. Hashtags won’t work just because you want them too, so, to succeed they more as a call to action and less about a message. This will lead to greater brand engagement. Of course, you can use message-oriented hashtags but make sure the call-to-action kind of hashtags are more in number, as they will work on the visibility.

Now, why to use hashtags and how to use hashtags is vivid, but to know if it is actually working, an organisation can use hashtag-tracking process and matrix. It is clear that by stuffing all the possible hashtags might not work and unknowing use of a wrong hashtag can backfire in the long-run. So, use of this process of hashtag tracking can be a solid step.

Hashtag tracking sounds a bit technical, lets break it to understand the process better. First, decide a unique hashtag, pretty much described in detail above. Think of a unique hashtag particular to your company’s or organisation’s content. This will declutter your matter from all the other similar work. Now, if the user or customer decided to click on that particular hashtag to know more relevant data, which obviously reflects your company, will get engaged by getting all the other information too, at one place. Isn’t it a clear plus point?

If you are not so sure about creating such a hashtag with massive responsibility by some random thought, simply go a little further and hire a social media content creator or simply content creator company to get the work done with great efficiency. One such great content writing company is Write Right, which can help with amazing content, Write Right is a content writing company which provides brilliant service with an outstanding piece of content. It is recognised and ranked by Good firm and Clutch as best among the other content writing agencies. Writers who excel at social media writing can craft hashtags for different platforms in minutes.

Use those hashtags created specifically for your company and create content for hashtags.  Make sure you use the hashtags for your content and content for your hashtags, as these are the social representation of your company. By using those specific hashtags, you can simply ignite the engagement. The idea is to make people aware of your company or organisation, make them aware of the company’s motto and its work and engage them by letting them know about the service and providing them with the requested service. What’s better than a social media hashtag, used on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which is all about your brand. When people get to know that the specific hashtags belong to a particular organisation, it creates a sense of awareness amongst the netizens. If your digital marketing agency hired a social media influencer for affiliation marketing, make sure they use the provided customized hashtag. So that it reaches their followers who trust them, and hence, the chain of promotion begins.

Now, find a robust hashtag tracking tool to monitor the campaign performance. It ensures if the hashtags customized and used for increasing the engagement are working or not, and how effective the hashtags are. A hashtag tracking tool will track the popularity of the content with the help of the hashtag. This will let the company know if there is a scope of improvement or not. Not only the popularity of the hashtag, the hashtag tracking tool will monitor the content with that hashtag and also prepare trend reports on a weekly/monthly basis about your hashtag’s usage, reach and engagement.

Once this hashtag tracking tool provides you with the required information, you can always make changes, upgrade and apply a new strategy in your social media marketing to get better results. The focus should be on metrics like reach, engagement, popularity and trend, that directly affect the growth or performance of the social media campaign.

A social media marketing strategy is a boon to the organisation, the correct hashtag can help in achieving a lot. As hashtags play an important role in the matrix, a correct hashtag can make the content reach a broader audience and a wrong hashtag can make the content’s reach restricted to a particular audience.

Reach is undoubtedly the most important metric, as it simply provides the information if the content is reaching to the target audience or not. It is the most important metric when the campaign goal is to boost the brand awareness. Reach involves the numerical that tell the brand or company about the people who actually saw the content using the hashtag.

Engagement comes after reach, as when people reach the content, then they start engaging. It is very important to use the right strategy to engage with the customer as it is going to decide if they are going to stay as a rabid customer or not. Trends are another important metric as it can take the content to a different reach, hence, increasing the engagement. Engagement through like, comments and sharing the content is the sign that the audience is happy with the content, and thus, when the trend is considered, more and more engagement is observed.

To gain popularity in the market of social media, it is important to understand its most useful feature, hashtag. A good social media strategy will be to use the hashtag as required and, change and modify as the situation demands.